6 Ways to Improve Repeat Purchase - VALUE of your Product & VALUE of Users Time

One of my friends is a real strong influencer for almost everything I buy.

He bought a HDFC Infinia card and he got me to buy one, he bought a house and he got me to buy one in the same complex, referred me to those Honey & Oat cookies from the bakery, body care products from Forrest Essentials and he is now pushing me to buy the Axis Magnus card.

In some of the above he did make some good money by referring me but that wasn’t always the sole purpose. If I now give it a thought what gets him to do all this is:

• He saw value and got benefited from the product & wanted to make sure his social circle also enjoys the benefit.
• The feeling of being the 1st one to introduce something new & valuable to all of us was a motivation too.

The point I am trying to make here is the best way to get highest repeat purchase is by building a product with real value, building advocates, identifying those advocates and nudging/incentivising them to refer your brand in their circle. More importantly if you don’t see this organically happening it might be important for you to relook at the product built.

So clearly the consistent value your product delivers is the biggest factor followed by few other important points like:

1) Know what and how to Measure:?Knowing the average duration for Repeat purchase from what you normally see in your industry and also by analysing behaviour of your best customers. Once you know the expected number of purchases from a user per year, you can measure what percentage of users actually hit this average.

2) Personalized Recommendations for a user?– Avoid single and generic messages across any channel be it emails, whatsapp, app notifications or any other ones. Every message you send to the user should have some context about the users interaction with you as a brand - it could be as simple as best sellers in the users geography to as personalized as sending 5 recommended products relevant to that specific user. Do make sure these recommendations are also a part of all your behavioural triggers like – Cart abandonment, Wishlist abandonment, post purchase messages etc.

90% of the brands today send generic and non-personalized messages even after knowing users preferences.

3) Gamified loyalty program valuing users time –?Most of the standard loyalty programs are a failure because they aren’t either offering or showcasing value back to the user and are purely based on purchase.

In today’s fast paced world its becoming important for you to also value the time user spends with the brand and more importantly gamify the program to stay on top of mind for the user. Brands like Duolingo and PinDuoDuo have been able to make a difference and we will talk about them in detail in the coming write ups.

4) Build a relationships through Genuine HELP and don’t always be transactional?– If everything you talk to your customers is about purchasing with you as a brand, that needs to stop today. A user can’t be buying with you everyday. That’s where its important you build content and utilities that are of help to your customers. Can be simple things like helping with content by telling your users about “10 Ways to take care of your Skin during the rainy season” to building complex product utilities like what?MakeMyTrip?had done during Covid days.

Utility by MakeMyTrip - You just type in the city or country name and it would give details of travel policies for those countries across the world. I am sure it helped them retain many users & avoid wasting marketing spends to reacquire the same users.        

5) Know your Best 20% Customers & Treat them like a King?– Giving a differential treatment to you best customers is a no brainer but something no-one does today. Early access, additional discounts or sending them gift vouchers are some of the simple thing to get started.?Rajesh Jain?talks about this in lot more detail under?Velvet Rope Marketing.

6) Referral Program with Lifetime benefits?– Like loyalty programs most of the referral programs also don’t do well since the brands themselves don’t value it as much.?A Wharton study says LTV of a referred customer is 16% higher than the non-referred one. The point here is if its impact can be so high why not give lifetime benefits to the customer who is referring your brand to someone, that itself becomes a big motivator for people to refer you in their social circles.

I will go deeper into each of these sections in my coming blogs, do share your prospective on the points mentioned and do add in-case you have yourself tried out some interesting ideas to increase Repeat purchase.