Whether online or offline, any business will want to ensure that they have a loyal customer base. A great product or service, while important, isn’t enough—customer service and experience plays a big part in making sure they keep coming back.

Customers need to be nurtured—especially when you’re running your business online. You need to invest time and effort into your customers given the lack of personal, face-to-face interaction that brick-and-mortar establishments typically have.

Here are some tried-and-tested strategies that you can try—

1. Get customers to return by using freebies and giveaways

Who doesn’t love freebies? In marketing, this little known fact has been a tried and true technique to keep patrons coming back to the shop. The same concept can be applied to ecommerce.

Try this—

Offer freebies or giveaways after a customer returns for a certain number of times or if they reach a certain amount.

Freebies and promotions encourage customers to complete their purchases and keep coming back for more.

The idea is to reward their loyalty. This keeps customers happy and engaged and ups the chances of them spending more on your site in the future.

Keep the following in mind though—

• Make sure your freebie is relevant to your product or service, but still useful for your customers. Ensure that it provides added value to their purchases.
• Don’t limit yourself to material tokens—you can offer additional information such as price sheets, user guides, downloadables, or even rebates and discounts.
• Because you’re asking for customers to return, you have to make sure that their experience on your site is great from the get-go—regardless if it’s their first purchase or if it’s their tenth.

2. Make sure you offer exceptional customer service

Speaking of customer service, here’s an important fact: a huge chunk of people who stop making purchases from a brand do so because of bad customer service.

Any strategy that you plan to implement in an effort to build customer loyalty is useless if your customer’s first point-of-contact with your brand is a horrible one.

The goal is to wow your customers, whether they’re first time buyers or regulars, with your stellar customer service.

Zappos.com is known to be one of the more exemplary examples of online customer service–putting their customer’s needs first and keeping them engaged online by answering their concerns and questions.

Online, here are some ways you can do that—

• Reply to customer comments and inquiries promptly. Answer their questions and complaints—whether it’s posted on the comment section of your site or your brand’s Facebook wall.
• If you’re selling a product or service, factors such as making it easy to make purchase returns and access to round-the-clock customer service representatives to answer their questions is important.
• Leverage on your social media to reach out to your customers. Engage them on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Ensure that your site is informative

Needless to say that you site has be designed well with impeccably written content—but to build a loyal customer base, you have to take that one step further by empowering your users to answer questions that they might already have, simply by going on your site.

A great example of online customer support is Mophie–a tech brand that offers access to FAQs, live customer support, and comprehensive guides.

It not only shows that your business is credible, but also that you listen to customers needs.

Try—

• Offering tutorials on your website.
• Providing a user forum where customers can talk among other customers and provide feedback or ask questions about your product or service.
• Create a comprehensive Q&A page that users can refer to.

You made such an effort to bring customers to your page, even more to ensure that they convert and become actual customers. Once they do, you want them to keep coming back—and these tips can certainly help your users feel nurtured. They’re simple and easily actionable, which means you can easily try them out on your own site now.

Make sure to tell us all about it and how well it worked for you in the comment section below.