Build a Personalized Experience that Keeps Your Shoppers Coming Back

<p>Ecommerce businesses <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/five-steps-for-merchants-to-thrive">face plenty of challenges</a>, but perhaps the biggest is how to make their brand stand out from the crowd. With so many options for customers to choose from, how do you make sure they pick you?</p><p>Continuously running large ad campaigns is not feasible—budgets are limited and these campaigns can be hard to measure and optimize. This means you need a cost-effective way to attract and keep customers.</p><p>The answer is to create a personalized experience for shoppers based on how they buy and what they love. Brands can do this by leveraging the first-party data they collect on customers to attract new customers, turn one-time shoppers into repeat customers, and increase customer lifetime value.</p><h2>Attract new customers</h2><p>Often when brands think about attracting new customers, their first idea is digital advertising targeted at customers with intent to buy. While digital ads can play a vital role in a brand’s overall marketing strategy, relying solely on them to bring in new customers can quickly get expensive, without necessarily returning value.&nbsp;</p><p>A more effective approach is to try to get in front of prospective customers before they have even started to think about making a purchase. Focus on building your brand awareness and reputation with prospective customers. Highlight what makes your brand unique, like your company values, product quality, or customer service. Build your reputation so that when customers are ready to buy, you are top of mind.</p><h2><strong>Keep customers coming back</strong></h2><p>Once new customers have discovered your brand, keep them coming back by providing them with customized experiences. Use the <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/first-party-data-is-the-best-defense-in-the-cookie-apocalypse">data you’ve collected on your customers</a> to build profiles to understand their patterns and preferences. Stay in touch with them with relevant communications about the products and sales that they might be interested in, based on their profile.</p><h2><strong>Increase customer lifetime value</strong></h2><p>When customers love and trust a brand they make larger purchases and come back more often. You’ll be able to see that your efforts to build your relationships with your customers are paying off by tracking key metrics:</p><ul><li>Average Order Value (AOV) - When customers know they can trust your brand and products they start to make larger purchases. When this becomes a trend you’ll see your overall AOV begin to rise.</li><li>Repeat Customer Spend - Breaking out the data between return and first-time customers will help highlight how repeat customers deliver value for your brand.</li><li>Account Registration Rates - Customer accounts can be a rich source of data to build customer profiles, so seeing more customers create accounts with your store means more opportunities to reach them.</li></ul><h2><strong>See Bolt Shopper Insights in action</strong></h2><p>Shoppers can easily request products through automated and customer service chats. As a buyer is engaging with your chat feature, Checkout Links will create a link that gives the shoppers exactly what they're looking for in a pre-If you’re wondering how to start leveraging shopper data to build relationships and stand out from the crowd, check out this video showing how Bolt helps you leverage shopper insights.</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><iframe src="https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/non7ghc0h6" frameborder="0"></iframe></div>