How to keep your customers loyal within today's online business

Abstract: For fashion online stores loyal customers are as important as they are for traditional retail stores. Through a high amount of loyal customers a company can reduce operational costs and increase its overall profitability. Finally a company can gain more benefits from retaining existing customers instead of acquiring new ones. Therefore it has become more important to win customer share than market share. To figure out how loyalty can be created a company needs to occupy itself intensively with the concept of Customer Relationship Management. There exist different types of loyalty and not every customer can be turned into a loyal customer. The company has to enter into a relationship with its customers that has to grow like the courtship. At best case the bond will end up in a satisfied win-win relationship that contains benefits for both the customer and the company. The longer the relationship will last, the higher the customer value will get and the more the company can profit from it. The same rules and principles also count for the online business. Because of higher costs for attracting new customers, high competition in the market and highly demanding customers treating your existing customers well and turning them into loyal customers is the key to success. E-Loyalty drivers give the company an indicator about what generates e-loyalty for company’s website. Why does a customer return to a website and why does he stick to a certain online shop? One of the most crucial factors to create loyalty in an online business is trust. Only when a customer trusts the vendor he will hand out his personal data, will return to the vendor and will recommend the online shop to others. When it was taken a further look at how online shops tackle the question of loyalty it became clear that the customer is put in the centre. The online shops heavily attempt to keep up with the latest ecommerce trends in order to win over customers. Through Social Commerce the companies have totally new possibilities to interact with the customers and to gain customer insight. In this way it has become much easier to understand the customer and to respond to his individual needs and preferences in order to build up a relationship with him.