The holiday marketing campaigns has most probably drained your marketing budget – ad costs are sky-high because of the fierce competition. That’s why it’s worth a try to get a better return on the money invested.

If you get your holiday season shoppers to shop again, those purchases will get you a higher profit margin than the first (if you even managed to make any) and most likely offset the cost of acquisition. We outline a few ways to do that in this piece.

How to get better returns on your holiday marketing money:

• Make gift buyers regulars
• Create a New Year resolution trend
• Invite gift receivers specifically into a member zone
• Double down on content and product use ideas
• Retarget browse abandoners with better offers
• Reengage reviewers

If you have an unlimited pool of potential customers and also unlimited budget to acquire them, this article is not for you. Your shop can survive with one-time sales.

If your target audience or budget, though, is not so huge, you need a high repeat purchase rate to stay in business.

Metilo’s focus is customer retention. We help you build long-lasting and profitable relationships with your customers and grow sustainably from there.

That’s why it’s important for us to share the good practices in customer retention. Consulting our clients, we have been able to see first-hand what works in different product categories and how retention fits in the big picture of business.

This report presents DTC metrics and customer retention stats from our consulting work with direct-to-consumer brands, summarizing it by categories so benchmarking yourself is more relevant. The brands included are niche, DTC, and long-term oriented, meaning they consciously work for retention and optimize their marketing using all our tools. We also highlight the best customer retention strategies employed.

Customer loyalty can have an overwhelming impact on your business. With so many brands of varying sizes focusing almost wholeheartedly on acquisition, they’re missing a lot of low-hanging fruit.

When you shift your focus to creating a post-purchase experience, you’ll find more customers coming back and buying from you a second time.

Why?

If an ecommerce brand wants to be successful in the long run, it needs to increase retention. DTC brands are so successful because of their focus on customer retention marketing.

Paid acquisition is no longer cheap enough to make money on single orders. As losing money on the first order is the norm now, profitability lies with existing customers where repeat orders offset acquisition costs. Once you’ve paid to play, make the most out of it.

Scaling at a loss is no longer an option. Retention gets you revenue without the marketing budget.

The benefits of customer retention are many and big:

Successful customer retention relies on constant communication between brand and customers. But how to do it without being annoying?

With carefully planned lifecycle emails. It is a customer engagement strategy that is based on your understanding of your customers and adding value to customer relationships.

There are various ways you can engage your customers on social media, via direct mail, paid search but email nurturing gives you the best levels of ROI in retaining customers. Good emails will earn you brand loyalty from existing customers without a loyalty program.

Of course, the content in emails is what makes the difference between a winning email strategy and a losing one. We will get to this a bit later.