Consumer Retention Tactics Post Lockdown

Bringing the new consumers in the brand eco-system

With the lockdowns getting a bit more relaxed we are now entering a phase where the initial boom of online shopping is seeing a steady slowdown.

Brands globally especially in CPG, Electronics, Home & Garden saw a lot of new consumer acquisitions in the last few months. The opportunity now is to ensure these new consumers are retained in the long term.

Crunch Data for Who these consumers were:

If the majority of the sales happened with retail partners (Instacart, Walmart.com, Amazon.com), ensure you have a consumer registration policy in place over the coming months. These strategies can be anything from, asking the consumers to register on your brand.coms, to running cross-promotions along with retailer partners to better understand who these consumers were. At the same time working along with your agencies to identify what kind of consumer retention tactics do their tech stack and analytics suites provide to help reach out to these consumers. If the consumers were acquired within the brand.com, some of the trends to look at would be:

- New vs Returning Users: Look at new sessions that were created in the last 3 months. Ensure that these consumers are reached out with tailored communications around new offers, special discounts, and any relevant offerings in the short term.

- Understand Keywords: Look at the new sessions and understand what keywords triggered these sessions, were they mainly necessity driven, example, “where to buy cornflakes”, “sanitizers in stock near me”, or were they more life-style driven example, “Gardening for Beginners”, “headphones for gaming”.

- Locations and Demographics: Look at where these consumers were acquired from. Are these locations legacy, where they could easily find your products if they step out post-lockdown, or were any new locations also a part of these sessions. If you see a considerable increase in searches happening from new locations, ensure that your products are covered in nearby big-box chains/ small shops accordingly.

Crunch Data for Why They Purchased:

Understanding why the consumers bought your products in the first place:

Stock as a factor: Was it purely because the brands they usually prefer were out of stock. If this is the case, then the retention tactics would need to be around increasing brand affinity.

Price as a factor: Was it because customers preferred purchasing your products because your price points was more in-sync with their budget.

Placements: Was it because your keywords were ranking higher vs customer for PLAs and search.

Crunch Data for what did the buy:

Once you are able to identify and segment these new consumers, promoting relevant product sets is essential. This is where it would be interesting to look at the sales trends you received from your eTail partners along with some trends you saw on your brand.com.

New session per product page: If you are a CPG brand, you would have seen a huge spike both in sales and traffic for some of the BIG PACK, BUNDLE SKUS. Now, it’s important to understand that consumers buying Big Packs was circumstantial. Hence in the future, you might want to target these consumers with a range of packs of the same product they had bought during lockdown to know what packs they would purchase in the long-term.

Lockdown has been a fortunate sales event for a lot of brands with revenues reaching Black Friday type milestones.

But the real opportunity lies in the long-term. Been able to identify the new customers and retaining the majority of them if not all would truly help sustain eCommerce growth for your brand.