How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Website to Improve Customer Loyalty

With 57% of shoppers spending more on brands that they are loyal to, understanding and quantifying customer loyalty has become crucial for businesses aiming to cultivate strong, lasting relationships with consumers. But with the $6.4 billion loyalty management market only continuing to grow, it can be overwhelming to understand what types of software to invest in to boost customer loyalty.

Before you spend marketing dollars to deploy costly programs that scale customer loyalty, consider this: you already have a powerful piece of technology at your disposal to measure and improve your customers’ loyalty— your website!

In this blog post, we’ll cover three website strategies you can run to improve customer loyalty. While not every idea on this list will work for every ecommerce company, we hope that these three ideas give you a solid foundation to optimize your website to create lasting relationships with your customers.

What is Customer Loyalty?

Before we hop into website strategies here’s a brief refresher on what customer loyalty is and why it’s important:

Customer loyalty refers to the customers’ tendency to consistently choose a particular brand's products or services over those of competitors. It goes beyond mere repeat purchases; it involves a strong emotional connection and allegiance to the brand. 

Loyal customers not only continue to buy from a brand but also become advocates, recommending the brand to others and defending it against criticism. Customer loyalty is built through positive experiences, consistent satisfaction, personalized interactions, and alignment with the brand's values and identity. It's a valuable asset for businesses, as loyal customers tend to be more profitable, less price-sensitive, and more likely to forgive occasional shortcomings.

Customer Loyalty Ecommerce Website Optimization Ideas

There are tons of ways to improve customer loyalty! Here are three ways to get started primarily using your website:

Personalize your website 

According to McKinsey, 71% of shoppers expect brands to deliver personalized experiences and those that do see better long-term customer retention. With facts and figures like this shaping the world of ecommerce, it’s clear that personalization is a key factor in building a lasting relationship with customers.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of ways to get started with website personalization! Here’s a list of unique ways to personalize your website experience that can help boost customer loyalty:

• Use dynamic copy to greet returning customers using their first name
• Recommend relevant products based on previous purchases
• Add a “recently viewed items” section so shoppers can pick up where they left off
• Customize social proof based on the returning customer’s interests or previous purchases

Focus on Customer Experience

The stakes are incredibly high when it comes to creating and maintaining a great customer experience. In fact, over half of customers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience with a brand. That’s why it’s more important than ever to optimize your website to create the best customer experience possible.

Here are a few ways to get started:

• Add a chatbot to your website so visitors can ask your team questions on the fly
• Create optimized website experiences for first-time visitors and  anonymous visitors to ensure a frictionless experience from the start of your relationship with shoppers

Build a Compelling Loyalty Program

If you don’t already have one, now is the time to build a loyalty program for your ecommerce brand. Operating akin to a membership club, loyalty programs offer incentives and rewards to customers for their continued patronage. And, with loyalty program members spending 40% more on average than non-members, they’re one of the most direct ways to foster customer loyalty through your website.

In addition to motivating customers to make repeat purchases, loyalty programs can also help you collect more zero-party data— an increasingly valuable resource as third-party cookies disappear. You can then use the data you collect to better inform your website personalization, and customer experience strategies—creating a flywheel that will result in increased customer loyalty.

While there are plenty of ways to build customer loyalty, we hope these three suggestions give you the inspiration you need to optimize your website to achieve your customer loyalty goals.