4 Tips for Driving More Repeat Business to Your CBD Brand
Where online marketing is concerned, many business owners spend most of their time focusing on increasing their organic web traffic with the goal of generating new business. Activities that generate web traffic – such as publishing new blog content or building new links to your website – are great marketing techniques because anything that increases your website’s organic traffic can bring an increase in business that’s sustainable and likely to provide long-term revenue.
A source of business that many online business owners neglect, though, is their existing customer bases – and if you’re in the CBD industry, failing to remain at the top of your customers’ minds is a recipe for disaster for two reasons.
- Retaining your existing customers costs much less than acquiring new ones.
- Consumers in the CBD industry don’t have a great deal of brand loyalty. They’ll gravitate toward whatever is new, novel or cheap unless you work to maintain their attention.
Increasing the amount of repeat business that your CBD brand receives isn’t just less expensive than getting new customers. It also helps your brand grow more quickly because you’ll always be folding your new customers into your customer retention program. Start bringing your lapsed customers back now with these tips for generating more repeat business in the CBD industry.
Add Novel New CBD Products to Your Store
One of the best ways to keep CBD buyers interested in your brand is by adding new types of CBD products to your store. Buyers are always looking for new ways to use CBD, and they’ll happily try anything that’s new and interesting. Powdered CBD, gummies and vaping products have become common in the CBD industry, though, and they’re no longer as novel as they once were. If you really want to capture your customers’ attention, you’ll need to be creative. VSAVI, for example, has added an entire line of CBD skincare products to its store. Adding CBD to premium beauty products has helped to differentiate the VSAVI brand and attract new customers who may not have been interested in traditional oral CBD oils. What novel CBD products could you use to bring lapsed customers back to your store?
Spruce Up Your Reward Program
One of the biggest mistakes that all online merchants – both inside and outside the CBD industry – make is simply using the default reward programs that come with their e-commerce platforms. A customer loyalty program that only involves earning reward points and exchanging those points for dollars isn’t particularly exciting for customers, many of whom will probably forget about the program entirely unless they’re on your website anyway.
To make matters worse, many e-commerce platforms don’t allow customers to use loyalty points and coupon codes simultaneously. If your CBD brand uses coupon codes – as almost all online merchants do – it’s likely that the coupons provide better discounts than the loyalty program does. In that case, your customers will pay no attention to your loyalty program whatsoever.
The purpose of a customer reward program is to keep buyers interested in your brand and maintain loyalty. If your reward program is to have the desired effect, it must be fun enough that customers will actually pay attention to it. Consider ways in which you could make your reward program more interactive. Could you add game elements to the reward program by offering unlockable tiers for long-term repeat purchases? Could you give free gifts or offer exclusive discounts to customers who reach those tiers?
Add Email Newsletters to Your Marketing Arsenal
When you acquire a new customer, that person gives you something extremely valuable: his or her email address. There’s a reason why all of the major online brands use email newsletters. It’s an inexpensive way to stimulate repeat business and remain at the forefront of customers’ minds. The last thing you want to do, though, is blast your customers with a price list – or announce a “spectacular sale” – several times a week. Customers ultimately become numb to those types of newsletters and stop opening them.
Maintaining an effective email marketing program is partially about sending newsletters often enough to remain top of mind while avoiding sending so many newsletters that your customers stop opening them. It’s also partially about ensuring that you provide value with each newsletter. Announcing sales or coupon codes is one way to provide value, but people will start to ignore those emails when they realize that the discounts aren’t really special because something is always on sale. It’s better to provide content that your customers will find interesting. Could you couple a newsletter with a helpful article about CBD? It’s worthwhile to produce that content for your email list because you can always repurpose the article as a blog post later.
Think about ways in which you can add interactive elements to your newsletters. You could, for example, have your customers vote on which product they’d like to see discounted next. You could insert a one-click survey into your newsletter and provide a coupon code as a reward for participation. You can even use your surveys as a form of independent research and write an article about the conclusions you’ve drawn from your data.
Lastly, to maximize the effectiveness of your newsletters, you should spend at least as much time on the headlines as you do on the content itself. If the headline isn’t appealing, the content won’t matter because people won’t open the newsletter.
Never Stop Differentiating Your Brand
One of the biggest challenges of operating in the CBD industry is the fact that your products are largely the same as the products that other CBD brands offer. If your customers think that they can get what you sell anywhere, they’ll have no reason to remain loyal to your brand. One way to differentiate your brand is by adding new types of CBD products that other brands don’t have. Another way is to describe your products in a manner that creates a sense of differentiation. Why should customers buy your products rather than buying from another CBD seller? All of the text on your website should be geared toward answering that one crucial question.
