There is no shortage of customer engagement strategies available on the internet today. 

All useful in their own right, they discuss the various ways you can retain an existing customer with your products/services. 

There is a reason why customer retention is such a hot topic nowadays. The following statistics on customer retention speak for themselves: 

1. 44% of businesses focus on acquiring customers while only 18% focus on retaining customers. 
2. 89% of companies state that customer service plays a vital role in retention. 
3. 76% of companies are firm believers that customer lifetime value is an important concept. 

You can get a feel for what I’m trying to say, don’t you? 

Retaining Customers is Better Than Targeting New Customers

This section isn’t aimed at demeaning customer acquisition. 

It’s good to get new customers once in a while but it’s a lot better to nurture the leads that have already become customers. Now, there are plenty of strategies that you can use to retain them. 

One of those strategies is pitching them a re-order option the next time they arrive at your store. 

While these strategies are focused entirely on B2B eCommerce, they can also be applied to B2C stores as well. 

Think about it. A customer has already purchased from your store. 

When you simply pitch them an option to purchase again, there are chances they will be interested in purchasing the same product from you again. 

By itself, this strategy may or may not work. But when combined with other customer retention strategies, this can prove an effective persuasion tool for your eCommerce business. 

For recurring customers to your store, specifically if they’re B2B, this reordering process can prove highly effective since B2B customers generally re-order the same product from the buyer. 

Let’s look at the four ways in which a reordering functionality can prove effective to your B2B eCommerce processes.

Reorder Notifications

One of the best ways to engage a customer towards reordering their purchase is to remind them. 

A reminder to a customer works best in the form of an email. Set a particular time for when you’re going to send out those emails to each individual customer.

Now, how will you know if a customer has used the items? 

How will you qualify a lead who wants to replenish the goods they purchased from your store? 

Your inventory management systems can give you an estimate of when such an event happens. With that data at hand, you can notify the customer at exactly the same time their inventory starts to dry up.

Ideally, your emails should be sent out a week before the inventory is about to run out. A soft sell from the outset, you can provide discounts for early buyers before the inventory runs out. 

Of course, in your next chain of emails, you can persuade them even further with discounts. 

Don’t go all guns blazing by providing a higher discount rate on the purchase in the first email. 

Save the best for last. 

One Click Reorder

All of what we’ve discussed until now is targeting the already converted customer. This isn’t an onboarding process, but rather one of retention. 

Because the customer has already been sold once or twice before, you want to make it easy for them to purchase the product. 

One click ordering or quick ordering work best in making the reordering process time-saving and efficient. 

There are plenty of plugins and extensions available for quick ordering. 

Our own B2B eCommerce platform, B2BWoo, comes equipped with a quick ordering feature which allows users to upload SKU codes or CSV files and checkout without ever having to go through each individual product. 

For B2B customers, this can prove very effective since customers usually purchase the same category of products from a single supplier. 

Integrating a one click ordering functionality to your store is a lot easier. 

All you have to do is add the previous purchase of the customer on their account next to a reorder button. 

This allows your customer to purchase the product in an even quicker manner. 

While it’s something that’s nice to have, it only works for customers who want to make no additions or subtractions to their purchase. 

Favorites List

Another simple, yet quite effective method of enabling customer reordering is to create a favorites list. 

It’s very similar to how you would create a favorites bookmark on your browser. The only difference is that the list of previous purchases is added to a favorites section. 

From there, customers can reorder products that they like. 

If the customer is inclined to purchase variations of products, this can prove effective since instead of the previous section, they now have an option to purchase the variations. 

“Buy One for a Friend” Email

 

This one is primarily focused on B2C customers since it doesn’t have any applications for B2B purchases. 

Suppose you have a customer who purchased a product from your store and left a good review of the product. 

At this point, you can convince them to purchase more of the product from your store. Sending emails that enables them to purchase the product for their friends or acquaintances is a good way to enable repeat purchases. 

Mix those in with gift cards, referrals, and discounts, and you have a surefire strategy to enable repeat purchases. 

By constantly adding value, regardless of whether your product is B2B or B2C, enables your customers to purchase the product without any problems. 

Conclusion:

We’ve already discussed the benefits customer retention can provide the customers. When done right, those benefits will indeed show themselves. 

For B2B customers, combined with other strategies, the re-ordering tips can prove very effective in ensuring a loyal and recurring customer base that keeps purchasing. 

If you’re a WooCommerce B2B store owner and want to enhance your productivity, then B2BWoo is a complete B2B eCommerce platform built on WooCommerce that lets you create a complete B2B system on your WooCommerce store. With all the essential B2B features integrated with the platform, B2BWoo is an ideal choice for all types of businesses looking to get started with eCommerce.