Note: This is a guest post from the eCommerce experts at Flits.
E-commerce has witnessed mammoth growth in recent years. In 2020, total online sales reached $4.2 trillion and is anticipated to grow to $6.5 trillion in 2023. Over the years, there’s been a considerable increase in the number of digital shoppers with over 2.05 billion shoppers buying online in 2020.
65% of a company’s business comes from its previous customers. In fact, retention drives more revenue for a business as compared to continually spending on trying to acquire new customers. As a result, brands fight tooth and nail to retain existing customers by providing them rewards, seasonal incentives, emailing them exciting new offers, leveraging FOMO and offering great customer service.
However, retaining customers is easier said than done. Every year, businesses are losing $1.6 trillion because they are losing their customers to their competitors. Returning customers make repeat purchases and spend more than the customer visiting your site for the first time. Even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your company revenue between 25-95%. Your old customers have become loyal to your product or service and understand its value, thus coming back again and again.
To boost retention, brands need to know their customers better. Brands which provide personalized experiences are favored by 80% of customers to purchase a product or service than brands who provide a one-size-fits-all experience. Knowing your customer’s preferences and likes will enable you to create a more personalized shopping experience and provide them a memorable experience on your site, leading to a better retention rate.
One way to do so is through your store’s Shopify customer account page where you can transform how customers interact with your store and experience a better and faster journey.
A customer account page is a page which contains all information about a customer: their order, billing and payment information, saved items, etc. Apart from crucial shopper details, the customer account page also lets shoppers view seasonal offers, rewards earned, referral programs and other additional features that elevates their online shopping experience on your Shopify store.
Customer account pages act as an excellent source to get an overview of a shopper’s preferences: products they like, repeat purchases, product browsing history and how they interact with your Shopify store.
Customer Account Pages are essential to do the following tasks:
- Keep all account Information at one place
- Keep track of billing information
- Keep track of your Payment Methods
- Keep track of shipping information (Address Book)
- Keep track of your orders
- Maintain a Wish list
- Manage returns and refund requests
- Update the status of your online orders
- Provide a chat solution to easily communicate with the store
- Show Rewards points
- Display seasonal deals & ongoing promotions
- Show your reviews
- Show the products you are selling (if you are a marketplace)
To get an idea of all that your store can achieve through a customer account page, take a look at Amazon, the king of eCommerce. Amazon’s customer account page boasts to have the most functionality than any other ecommerce site. Amazon masterfully anticipates everything a customer might need during their shopping journey and provides it through their personalized customer account page.
Now that we've established what all a customer account page can accomplish, one might wonder why this page is so crucial for a customer and a business.
The eCommerce account pages are a critical part of your online store’s success because they offer a place for customers to do many important eCommerce actions and interact with your store further.
The account pages are a critical component to any successful eCommerce website, and a good eCommerce website will have robust and user friendly account pages.
When you make it easier for visitors to set up customer account pages with a simple email signup or a one-click login using Facebook or Google, you eliminate the tedious signup process that most shoppers dread when registering on a new site. Moreover, a one-click social signup also helps you receive the shopper’s data from their social platforms: the pages they’ve interacted with, the trends they like etc. This can then be used to give personalized recommendations and marketing campaigns to make more sales.
Every shopper is different and understanding them is the way to multiply your Shopify sales. A customer account page makes it easy to get an overview of how your customer interacts with your store. Observe your customer’s browsing activity, cart order, items they’ve wishlisted and their reorders all at the same place. This helps you identify a pattern in your customer’s shopping behavior, understand what products they really like and enable you to create personalized marketing campaigns.
Targeted marketing campaigns enable you to sell more. Capture purchase intent with social login & wishlists. Use the Shopper’s data from the customer account page for making personalized product recommendations via Social media or email marketing. Set up upsell and cross-sell campaigns to increase your average order value.
With more than 70% of customers shopping online, and the tremendous amount of choices being bombarded at a typical customer, shopping anxiety is a real thing.
While e-Commerce has been a boon for online shoppers, giving them nearly unlimited buying options, it also leads to something called a purchase paralysis. This ultimately leads to cart abandonment and the online store loses out on potential sales.
A customer account page can provide your customer with the right information, simplify this decision-making process and increase sales. Inside a customer account page, one can view their order history, repeat purchases, and items they've wishlisted: giving the shopper a one-stop place to keep tabs on their explored products. This helps customers feel less worried about tracking their purchases and feel better about interacting and choosing your brand, eventually coming back for more.
A lot of shoppers tend to forget where they made a purchase from - and the more difficult it is for them to find a product they want to buy again, the less likely you are to get a repeat sale.
On your customer account page, displaying order history and recently viewed products, makes it much easier to place a reorder for the customer, thus increasing your repeat sales and revenue.
Moreover, customer account pages enable shoppers to store all essential details (customer details, shipping and payment information) at one place automatically after they place their first order. Using this info to pre-fill their details the next time a customer orders, makes it easier to checkout within minutes, creating a faster and better shopping experience.
Brands leverage customer account pages to display store credits and other rewards programs. This increases likelihood of repeat purchases and keeps them motivated to buy more using the store credits and seasonal offers. Thus boosting customer retention and increasing sales.
How customers experience shopping on your online store will determine if they become repeat customers or move on to your competitors. When you build beautiful customer account pages showcasing all shopper data at one place, your customers gain a more engaging experience on your site.
Amazon, the king of eCommerce leverages customer account pages to provide their customers an advanced experience and facilitate ease of purchase. Think of any action a customer might want to take with their account and Amazon provides it with numerous links on one page:
Add-ons like ability to wishlist, social login, store credits, search plus filter option in order history etc make the shopper’s journey easier and boost sales on your customer account page.
The answer is a loud YES!
This can clearly be attested by big brands like Amazon and Walmart, which have mastered their customer account pages to provide a truly-like-no-other experience to the online shopper.
A customer account page is instrumental in providing the kind of shopping experience that will retain your customers with your brand for a long time. With increasing competition in ecommerce, the more information you have about your customers, the better are your services. And great customer account pages are your ticket to achieve that.
Set up a personalized customer account page on your Shopify store today with Flits. With Flits, effortlessly transform your customer account page with personalized features and custom add-ons to allow customers to frequently interact with your Shopify store. Now easily add features like Wishlisting, Reorders, Rewards, referrals, social logins and enable browsing history.
Once set up, monitoring how customers use their customer account page makes it easy for you to make tweaks to the account page. Furthermore, use this data to set up personalized marketing messages and even on-site tactics for better conversions.
