Although many eCommerce retailers are doing a good job of competing with the big stores and brands to increase customer reach, there is still more that can be done. To increase profits, boost turnover and grow your eCommerce business, you need to understand how to attract new customers while retaining the ones you already have.

You may not know this, but a simple 5% increase in customer retention is enough to boost your company's profits by 25 to 95%.

Building a loyal and engaged customer base is no easy feat in today's increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape. But if you manage to create and expand it, you're one step closer to having a successful online business.

The following strategies explain how to reach customers and make them stay more effectively.

5 Tactics To Broaden Your Customer Reach

Want to capture a more extensive customer base? If so, you need to focus on your customer reach. A customer reach is the volume of customers you cover through various channels.

Here are five tactics to broaden your customer reach:

1. Use Influencer Marketing

The term "influencer marketing" is thrown around a lot in today's marketing world. It seems like every company is jumping on board and investing in influencer campaigns, which means the competition for influencers' attention is fierce. This trend is not surprising, seeing as people spend at least 147 minutes every day on their social media feeds, making social media platforms an effective channel for marketing.

If you want to make an impact through influencers, try hiring micro-influencers instead of focusing on big names.

Micro-influencers typically have smaller followings (less than 10,000 followers), but they tend to be more niche-specific and, therefore, more engaged with their audience. This makes them an excellent option for attracting potential customers.

2. Leverage Your Email List

Another way you can expand your customer reach is to use existing email lists better. The easiest way to do this is through a marketing automation platform that streamlines the mailing process and lets you know how well each email campaign performs.

You can use these platforms to automate email campaigns based on whether the recipient opened a previous email or clicked on a link. You can also use them for triggered campaigns, sending emails automatically whenever someone does something specific, for example, downloading an ebook or abandoning a shopping cart online.

Remember, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs, with a $1 spend returning as much as $38. Hence, it's a cost-effective way to reach more people.

3. Be Active On Social Media

When it comes to how to reach consumers, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provide tons of opportunities to engage with people and boost the visibility of your brand. Take advantage of hashtags to increase your odds of appearing in search results. You can also use tools like Facebook advertising to target specific audiences.

As already pointed out, it's also helpful to promote user-generated content (UGC) through influencer marketing campaigns that harness the power of fans and advocates who love what you do.

4. Combine Multiple Channels

If you are thinking of how to reach customers and boost your bottom line, you need to combine multiple marketing strategies, both online and offline. You can start by building your brand through social media, concentrating on content marketing, or focusing on search engine optimization. But the best way to reach new customers, increase leads and conversions is to use a combination of many channels. For example, you can boost online marketing efforts with personalized direct mail marketing delivered to customers' doorsteps.

By combining multiple marketing strategies, you can make sure that more people have the chance to find out about your business and what it has to offer.

5. Provide Excellent Customer Support and Service

The most critical step in all these customer reach efforts is to provide excellent customer support and service. Most people will have questions or concerns at some point during their relationship with your business. Hence, you should have a team to help your customers when they need it.

If you can't provide excellent customer support, then you're not going to be able to reach many customers. Word of mouth is the most powerful advertising tool, and if you don't keep your customers happy, they're not going to tell their friends about how awesome you are.

How Retention Rates Improve Customer Value

Improving customer retention rates is the name of the game. Retention rates measure how well a company can keep customers happy. Besides, every professional marketer knows that it is more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain old ones. Hence, after you grow customer reach and acquire new leads, you need to start nurturing them to make them stay.

Discover Six Ways to Build Real Customer Loyalty for Your Business

The reason it's so important to focus on customer retention is that it drives higher customer lifetime value (LTV). Customer LTV is exactly what it sounds like: how much a customer is worth over the course of their lifetime at your company.

CLV takes into account a variety of factors, including:

• How much money do they spend on average per year
• How long do they remain a customer
• The cost of acquiring them in the first place (as well as the cost of retaining them)

When you improve retention and reduce churn, you improve LTV. The more customers stick around and make purchases, the more money you can expect to make from them. The higher your retention rate, the more valuable your customers are.

As to customer retention strategies, communication is the key. To build a strong connection with your customers, you need to interact with them through all popular channels, from social media to direct mail. Moreover, it would be best to make these communications relevant and personalized. Learn how the Inkit reach enablement platform helps with this below.

Improve Customer Reach and Retention With Inkit

Retaining existing customers is more important than ever. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, where consumers have access to a virtually unlimited number of product options, it's critical for businesses to nurture their current customer base.

One of the most effective customer retention strategies is direct mail marketing. Direct mail is an inexpensive, highly-targeted marketing tool that allows businesses to reach their customers in a highly personalized manner.

When most businesses think of direct mail, they think of sending marketing materials to potential customers. But there are many other reasons why a company should also use direct mail for customer retention.

• Promoting existing products and services
• Send out surveys
• Reward loyal customers
• Send announcements about promotions
• Cross-sell or upsell with other products
• Show them you care with handwritten notes
• Send important notifications
• Deliver bills and invoices

Companies looking to retain customers can use Inkit's reach enablement/ direct mail automation platform to send targeted direct mail campaigns. Inkit Send helps you create, send, and track mail campaigns that are personalized and automated while also being scalable and affordable.

Besides Send, Inkit supports the Render product for automated document generation. This API automatically renders online docs based on triggers to deliver them to customers. This way, Inkit helps reach people across many online and offline channels to nurture relationships with them.

Sign up for a free trial to see how Inkit works now.

Final Thoughts

Capitalizing on your existing customer base is a great way to expand your market reach and improve performance. Your goal as a business owner should be to add more value to your current customers, which will be easier to achieve with tips and strategies like those outlined in this guide. Automated customer reach software like Inkit can also considerably help.