Starting an Online Business? - Guide 10 – Generating Repeat Business

After the business has built up a customer base that use your services or buy your products then you can start to build an online business relationship. By building a relationship with your current customers, the business will be able to encourage the customers to use the service again and also recommend the business to other potential customers thus driving them to the ecommerce solution or to make contact.

Online businesses have many ways of generating a relationship with their customers, all of them include being creative in the relevant industry and through various online channels. Here are a few of the main techniques used to generate repeat business and build a relationship:

Social Networking: All businesses must have an online social presence, with the rise of Facebook (600m users worldwide) and Twitter (175m users worldwide) the need to engage with this market is essential to create a relationship with your customers. Create a business page on Facebook to advertise and connect, create a Twitter account to converse directly with customers and keep them up to date. Other business social networking sites include, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and PartnerUp.

Competitions and Discount Codes: By creating a competition to win a relevant industry prize engages your customers and they will more than likely pass the details onto their network generating the ecommerce solution more traffic and more customer information.

Business Forums: A great way to interact with like-minded business individuals and potential customers. By joining a community such as a forum gives the business an opportunity to share its expertise and participate in issues and topics that is relevant to the business.

Affiliate Schemes: The businesses customers are potentially the sales team; this is more evident when they join up to an affiliate scheme. By offering the customers’ incentives to signup other customers it creates a business relationship which leads to an increase in sales and repeat business. An ecommerce software solution may have an affiliate scheme that includes a percentage of the signup fee or a monthly percentage based on the package bought.

Newsletters: When a customer purchases online or signups to a service, a business has instant contact details, including name, address and, importantly email. If the customer has stated not to receive any online campaigns then leave them out of the newsletter. Using ecommerce software a business can send newsletters to the email addresses frequently to promote sales, competitions and incentives. This technique is widely used in online retail to promote their items and generates enormous repeat business opportunities.

Generating repeat business and getting customers to work for the business are essential to the success of any ecommerce solution. Use the above techniques to engage with your customers and potential customers, select the relevant information to promote and listen to current customers as they should be promoting the business online as well as the marketing team.