In our predictions for 2015 ecommerce, we stressed the importance of focusing on the customer experience and have kept up that focus with subsequent posts in this first quarter of 2015.
One of the main things we’ve concluded through our focus on the customer experience is that it facilitates customer acquisition and retention, which are obvious prerequisites for making money online. As we see in this week’s Ecommerce Eye Candy, “89 percent of companies see customer experience as a key factor in driving customer loyalty and retention.”
This infographic from Invesp begins with the adage that it costs more to create a new customer than to keep an existing one, so you should work hard on keeping your existing customers happy. In this case, the infographic claims the cost is five times as much. When I googled this interesting tidbit I wasn’t exactly surprised to find some discrepancy among the results regarding both the extent and veracity of that claim.
The infographic further wades into the challenge of focusing on the truly important aspects of customer loyalty, and shows that it is difficult for companies to prioritize the things that drive business growth. For example, we previously learned that marketers and sales teams spend an inordinate amount of time marketing to prospects and leads at the bottom of the sales funnel to the detriment of those potential customers at the top of the funnel. Similarly, this infographic says that companies spend too much time trying to acquire new customers at the expense of investing resources into retaining the ones they already have.
Another challenge in keeping customers coming back is that although “76 percent of companies see customer lifetime value as an important concept for their organization,” less than half are able to measure it accurately, and it is already an axiom in the business community that if you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it.
Infographic by- Invesp
