Repeat Sales: the most effective ways to retain customers

Repeat Sale is a sale of goods and services to customers that have previously purchased goods from your business. The main difference between repeat sales and sales to new customers is that attracting new customers is more complicated and expensive than retaining old ones. Besides, old customers are more profitable.

In today’s article, AINSYS specialists share tips on building an effective repeat sales system, what metrics to use, and how to monitor results.

Why are Repeat Sales so important?

There are several benefits to repeat sales:

• Stability.

Loyal customer means consistent revenue — even if, for some reason, your business does not see a lot of new customers, repeat sales will help in waiting out the storm.

• Protection from competitors.

If the customer keeps coming back, they are sure of your product’s quality and service level and are unlikely to choose your competitors just to cut costs since people tend to prioritize quality.

• Increase in sales

Repeat clients generally purchase the same products at regular intervals, for example, a kilo of coffee beans every couple of weeks. However, if you set up the right strategy, you will be able to convince them to buy additional goods, for example, a piece of cake with every coffee.

• Cutting marketing costs

Again, attracting new customers is more expensive and requires more specialists than increasing repeat sales.

Another way to reduce spending is to implement integration software to connect applications your marketers use. Data on your previous customers is often scattered across multiple apps, such as messengers, call tracking software, and CRMs. To help your employees work more effectively, AINSYS developers introduce between-apps connectors that allow you to securely extract data and load it into a single data warehouse, where employees will be able to quickly analyze it.

Alright, we get it, it’s important to keep repeat sales in mind. But…

How to provide more Repeat Sales?

AINSYS specialists have created a checklist for setting up a repeat sales system

1. Break your client database into categories

This will allow you to identify customers’ needs better and increase their loyalty. The following qualities can be used for categorization:

• Geographic (places of residence, workplaces, universities);
• Demographic (gender, age, job, education level);
• Marketing behaviors (website visits, visited pages, purchases, and others).

2. Choose the sale type right

To set up a proper strategy, you will need to keep the sales types in mind as well. This includes clearance and season sales, purchasing additional products after some time has passed since the customers’ initial purchase, cross-sell, and so on.

3. Implement automation instruments

To create and work out all aspects of your strategy, you will need to set up and implement several marketing instruments, such as software for newsletters, retargeting, reward systems, and others.

These processes and systems, as well as sales, have to be automated and streamlined for you to see how effective your strategy is.

AINSYS offers a free solution for businesses that require small volumes of data processed — 500 operations every month. Check out our pricing page to learn what other rates we offer. AINSYS Single Source of Truth will help you gather the right marketing metrics to assess marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.

Metrics to watch to generate more Repeat Sales

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is calculated according to the following formula: divide the total expenses to acquire customers (sales and marketing costs) by the total number of customers acquired over a certain period of time;
• AOV (Average Order Value) is total revenue divided by the number of orders;
• LTV (Lifetime Value) helps to estimate the average revenue that a customer will generate throughout their lifespan as a customer. LTV= Average Revenue Per User × Lifespan of the customer;
• CRR (Customer Retention Rate): customers you have at the start (S), at the end (E), and customers acquired during the period you’re measuring (N). The formula looks like this: CRR = ((E-N)/S) x 100.

Tracking marketing metrics is only possible with proper service integration. AINSYS has become the best option for companies looking to set up an effective repeat sales system. Our developers are ready to help you solve any automation and integration issues that come up along the way. We know that locating and integrating the best software for fitting a specific business need and closing skills gaps can take time and effort. But we can help you with that. Contact us to learn more.

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