It may seem like a bad idea to have your customers register online before letting them access your store’s most important features. But are there any merits to registering online shoppers?
True, customer registration forces shoppers to take extra steps before using your services. Some experts even argue that this inconvenience can drive people away from your website.
Thankfully, the good that customer registration can do can offset this issue. In fact, it can provide you with various benefits that can boost customer loyalty. And as we all know, a loyal clientele is essential to the success of any wholesale business.
With the help of trusted online tools, customer registration can even prove an effective lead capture strategy. This is vital to the growth of any business.
So, how, exactly, can registering online shoppers enhance customer loyalty? Let’s find out!
What Is Customer Loyalty?
Before we discuss how customer registration can positively impact customer loyalty, let’s define what customer loyalty is.
Customer loyalty is the continuous emotional relationship between a customer and a business (in this case, your wholesale store). It manifests in a customer’s willingness to keep purchasing your products instead of your rivals’.
Loyal customers:
- Regularly purchase from your store, thus providing you with a reliable income source
- Use the products they buy from you
- Use various channels to interact with you
- Encourage others to do business with you through positive word of mouth
There are various ways to improve customer loyalty. For instance, you can use a loyalty program to reward customers who use your services often. You can also use customer registration to make their shopping experience more fulfilling.
With all that in mind, let’s jump into how registering online shoppers can bolster customer loyalty!
4 Ways Registering Online Shoppers Boosts Customer Loyalty
According to some marketing experts, requiring customer registration can inconvenience shoppers. The resulting dissatisfaction can then lead to cart abandonment and thus lost sales.
However, customer registration can benefit your business in four major ways:
1. It can improve customer service
Providing occasional shoppers with excellent customer service is among the most effective ways to convert them into loyal, lifelong patrons. After all, every shopper wants to be treated with kindness and respect; just because they pay you for your services doesn’t mean you can treat them like walking cash dispensers.
But how can customer registration lead to better customer service?
Let’s say you let a customer buy products from your store without registration. After a few days, they receive their package only to find out some of the items are defective.
The customer wants your help to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, without customer registration, you likely don’t have accurate, detailed records of who purchased what products and when. Therefore, you’ll have a tough time determining which order said shopper is talking about.
This can result in your failure to assist your customer properly and promptly. Consequently, the customer can end up dissatisfied, encouraging them to look elsewhere for their purchases.
In contrast, customer registration will allow you to send shoppers links to their orders. This will let them examine their order history, shipment tracking, and other important information. As you’ll also be privy to such information, you can help your customers more quickly and effectively.
2. It can encourage sales
Registering online customers grants you many opportunities to cultivate customer loyalty. For one thing, you can employ strategies designed to encourage regular spending.
Maintaining a record of your customers ensures crucial information about them is always at your fingertips. For example, when required, you’ll have access to relevant customer data, including customer identity, contact information, and location. You’ll also know what products they typically purchase and how often they purchase them.
You can use this knowledge to your advantage. Do you have a customer who loves buying t-shirts? Then you can send them personalized recommendations whenever new t-shirts become available at your store. This can give every shopper a unique experience aimed at helping them discover the items they’d love to buy. As you can imagine, this is a great way to make them feel special as well as boost your sales.
Customer registration can help encourage purchases another way. For instance, let’s say a customer forgets about the item they added to their cart. Remember, this item remains in their cart. Therefore, they’ll notice that they still have an order to complete the moment they return to your online store. This can prevent loss of revenue due to abandoned carts.
Additionally, registering online customers lets you refer to each customer by name. This can help contribute to the personalized experience people often associate with special treatment. And the more special your customers feel, the greater their loyalty toward you.
3. It can speed up checkouts
As mentioned above, customer registration lets you keep a record of necessary shopper information such as payment details and addresses.
Because customer registration permanently preserves such information, a customer needs to enter their details into your store only once – upon making their first purchase. For every following transaction, all they have to do to complete their order is to click a few buttons.
By vastly reducing the amount of time and effort it takes to purchase items from your store, you facilitate the checkout process. The resulting convenience can then improve customer experience and satisfaction. Over time, this can promote customer loyalty and increase sales.
4. It can make your customers feel protected
Registration gathers sensitive customer information, such as credit card or bank information. Thankfully, this data is kept safe within the confines of your store’s database; the only people with access to it are the customer and yourself as the store owner.
In short, registering online shoppers offers them the privacy and security they need to feel comfortable doing business with you. This cultivates their trust in you, which contributes to the building of customer loyalty.
Registering Online Shoppers Made Easy Thanks To Modern Online Tools
As mentioned above, modern online tools facilitate lead capture via customer registration. One such tool is our Wholesale Lead Capture plugin for WooCommerce.
This plugin simplifies the development of an effective, user-friendly customer registration page. We even have user-friendly guides on how to use this tool so you can have said page up and running in no time.
Our other Wholesale Suite tools let you streamline key business processes. This lets you attract new customers, boost your revenue, and more.
Conclusion: Registering Online Shoppers Can Promote Customer Loyalty
Converting occasional shoppers into lifelong patrons can be tough. However, customer registration can grant you opportunities to offer your customers special treatment. This, in turn, can make them more likely to stay loyal to your business.
To recap, registering online shoppers can promote customer loyalty by:
- Improving customer service
- Encouraging sales
- Speeding up the checkout process
- Granting customers privacy and security
Would you like to know more about customer registration? How about the tools you can use to register online shoppers? Please let us know in the comments section below; we’d be happy to help!
