Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4: Nurturing (and Bringing Back) Customers

In This Chapter

• Understanding why loyal customers don't return to your site
• Creating offers that elicit a renewed response to buy
• Pampering customers with top-notch service
• Thanking customers for their loyalty

“If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, they're yours.” Hah! That quote might have worked for novelist Richard Bach in the 1970s, but it won't work for your site. When you're fighting for customer loyalty (and retention), nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, keeping — or nurturing — good customers and enticing lost customers to return are not always easy tasks. Have you ever considered how much attention, time, and money businesses spend marketing to attract new customers? With ongoing efforts to grow new business, it's easy to understand how your existing customers might get overlooked or taken for granted. But continuing to do so often leads to lost customers. And ignoring an occasional customer departure or two, can be an expensive mistake for your online business.

Consider that gaining a new customer costs approximately five to six times as much as keeping an existing one. However, research indicates that less than 20 percent of marketing budgets go toward marketing to existing customers, even though the return on your investment (or ROI) for those dollars could be much greater!

So what happens when existing customers get fed up and decide to leave? Is it too late to show them that you care? ...