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"It's not how many come in, it's how many come back that's important."

Doesn't that say it all?

One of the biggest challenges of doing any online business is formulating a customer retention strategy. How do you make sure existing customers keep coming back to you? Generally, retention strategies involve reward programs. While these programs work to an extent, they focus on only those customers who have bought on your website. While they are certainly important, it is also necessary to treat the visitor who is not buying as equally important. How do you induce them to try your product, and then make repeat purchases? That's the problem that customer retention programs must solve.

A customer retention program is a powerful tool for customer relationship management. The focus of such programs is to convert first time or occasional buyers into long term customers. This is of immense value for e-commerce firms as the cost of acquiring a new customer is far greater than the cost of retaining an existing one.

To begin with, find out the level of satisfaction among existing customers. More importantly, you need to understand the reason why a customer might have stopped doing business with you. Is it because of unsatisfactory service levels, higher price, physical distance or rival offers?

Here are some quick customer retention tactics that you can employ:

Keep it fresh: Content sells. Regularly update your site with well written content, which will induce visitors to return. Then wait for word of mouth to do the trick. Remember, if a visitor sees the same site every time he drops in, he'll soon stop. If that's happening on your site, you can bid goodbye to your chances of building loyalty.

Stay in touch: Create newsletters or articles of interest that could be sent to visitors periodically. Feedback forms are extremely important, especially since it is the customer who is initiating contact. All these are great tools for customer retention. If the write-ups are well written and knowledgeable, the image of your business is enhanced in the eyes of the customer, while newsletters are a simple and effective way of reminding them of your existence.

Offer freebies: Include free sign-ups for future announcements. Visitors who sign up for these make great customers, because they are already favorably inclined towards your business.

While these were some quick tips, there's a lot more that has been written about the subject. amazon.com has books such as 'Customer Retention: An Integrated Process for Keeping Your Best Customers', 'Customer Retention in a Week', 'Winning At Customer Retention Ways ', 'Developing a Customer Retention Program' which will help you understand and develop better retention strategies.