How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value on Your Shopify Store

It is much easier and cheaper to keep existing customers and to sell to previous customers than it is to obtain new customers altogether. When a customer has already purchased a product from your Shopify store in the past, they are aware of your store, your products, and the quality of your service delivery.

Existing customers already know your brand, products, service, etc. And since you have their contact details, it is relatively easy to reach out to them with new offers via email or retargeting ads, for example. However, it requires a great deal of effort and money to make new customers aware of your brand, to bring them into your Shopify store, to make them like your products, your offering, and what you stand for before you can actually convert a sale.

By marketing your products to people who have already bought from your store in the past, you can increase the customer lifetime value (CLV). There are several techniques for increasing CLV, such as post-purchase email campaigns, upsell apps, loyalty programs, retargeting ads, etc.

Post-Purchase Email Campaigns

Email marketing is a great way to increase sales and repeat purchases. There are significant advantages to email marketing over other forms of marketing:

1. Emails are cheap - Once you obtain customers' emails, it is much cheaper to reach them via email than ad campaigns, social media, or other types of paid marketing.
2. Emails can be automated - You can create multiple email marketing campaigns and text them automatically until you get the desired results.
3. Emails can be sent many times - Email marketing campaigns that produce good results can keep running for years.
4. Emails make customers remember your brand - Email marketing is not just about getting your to purchase again here and now. It is also about keeping your brand name at the top of your customers' minds so that when they reencounter it, they will respond immediately and won't need to go through a full marketing process again.

All of these are very good reasons for building an email list.

There are many email marketing apps, such as MailChimp and Klaviyo, for your Shopify store. These apps have simple interfaces that allow you to create email marketing sequences, run AB tests, measure and improve results over time, without needing the help of a Shopify expert or developer.

Don't think of emails as separate random messages. Using an email marketing app you can set multiple campaigns that are triggered on specific dates, when customers take certain actions on your store, or when you have special offers. Each campaign can and should include not just one, but a series of emails, that gradually motivate customers to purchase again from your store.

For example, once a customer has purchased a product from your store, your email marketing app can send them an order confirmation email that also promotes additional discounted products. If the order confirmation email doesn't lead to a sale, the app can send them a satisfaction survey that contains a discount coupon for their next purchase.

Upsell Apps

Upsell apps are very effective at increasing customers' total sales value. These apps typically integrate into your Shopify store and show customers discounts, promotions, and complementing products before they checkout, driving them to add additional products to their cart.

Loyalty and Rewards Programs

Many e-commerce businesses run loyalty and rewards programs in order to stay in touch and build relationships with their customers. While sending out news emails about your business is time-consuming, loyalty programs provide merchants with a simple "excuse" to keep emailing their customers with special offers and promotions almost entirely automatically.

Besides retrieving customers to increase revenues and improve customer lifetime value, loyalty programs can improve your business's communication with customers, improve your branding so that you don't compete on price alone, and attract new customers.

Retargeting Ads

Have you ever wondered why sometimes you get retargeted with ads even after you have already purchased a product?

The reason is that besides being super effective at converting new sales, retargeting ads are also very efficient at presenting specific offers to customers who have already bought at your store, in order to drive them to buy again.

Final Verdict

As a Shopify merchant, you have many techniques and tools for improving customer lifetime value, but it doesn't mean you have to try them all at once. Review the options we have laid out in this post and start with just one or two that seem most promising.

Any marketing endeavour requires trial and error, and this case is no different. Once you've optimized one technique, go on to add another one.