3 Steps to Designing CRM Scenarios That Build Loyal Customers on Shopify
In this article, we share practical tips for designing CRM scenarios on Shopify that, with just a few tweaks, can significantly improve performance. This guide is especially helpful for merchants who are unsure how to approach CRM scenario design on Shopify. Follow these steps to cultivate loyal customers through CRM — we encourage you to read to the end.
For those who want a comprehensive, foundational understanding of CRM on Shopify and how to leverage Klaviyo — not just for loyal customer strategies — please refer to the article below.
StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support businesses with granular operations that manual processes cannot handle and large-scale campaign execution. If you are struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction materials here
Monitoring Loyal Customers
Loyal customers are not simply those who spend more or purchase more frequently — they are customers with high engagement with your brand.
The chart below classifies customers from A to E based on purchase amount and frequency (A being highest), and further segments them into an upper row "＋" for high engagement and a lower row "-" for low engagement.
Engagement is measured by whether customers have had brand experiences beyond product purchases. Brand experiences vary by merchant and may include subscribing to a regular newsletter, using an app, attending exclusive events, and more.
While purchasing products is itself an important brand experience, relying on it alone limits your options for building loyal customers. We recommend actively managing brand experiences as part of your strategy for nurturing loyalty.
By monitoring both purchase amount/frequency and engagement, your strategic direction becomes clearer: "get them to buy" or "deepen the relationship." In the diagram below, moving right represents "get them to buy" initiatives, while moving up represents "deepen the relationship" initiatives.
Why Growing Your Loyal Customer Base Matters
Having a large base of loyal customers enables you to generate significant revenue every time you launch a new product. Loyal customers also refer friends and family, making organic word-of-mouth more likely, and they help maintain high engagement on your social media accounts, boosting your reach. All of these contribute to building sales without relying on advertising.
Loyal customers and average customers can differ by tens of times in annual revenue contribution. Acquiring even a single loyal customer can be enormously profitable. While the 80/20 rule does not apply to every merchant, those with low advertising dependency tend to see a customer and revenue distribution that closely mirrors it.
3 Steps to Designing CRM Scenarios
With the importance of loyal customers established, let us walk through the CRM scenario design process in three steps.
Step 1: Measure Customer Data
First, measure customer data so you can compare customer attributes, purchased products, and experience events across customer tiers. To enable these comparisons, you will need to set up customer surveys and event tracking in advance.
Track events that measure customers' engagement experiences with your brand. Collecting data from Shopify, public apps, and custom apps and integrating it into Shopify's customer data will make it much easier to leverage later.
Step 2: Aggregate Key Experiences and Customer Attributes
In the second step, compare customers who move up in tier against those who do not, and identify what products tier-advancing customers purchase and what brand experiences they have.
Once you understand the characteristics of loyal customers, assess each customer's potential and risk, label them accordingly, and make that information available for use in your CRM.
Step 3: Reflect Analysis Results in Your CRM Scenarios
In the third step, translate the experiences that lead to loyal customer conversion into scenarios. It helps to design these experiences in two categories: reward experiences (things customers receive as a perk) and incentivized experiences (things customers are encouraged to do with an added incentive).
It is also effective to offer special deals to customers with high potential and those at risk of dropping in tier. Build scenarios such as temporarily upgrading their loyalty program tier or inviting them to an exclusive sale.
Thorough CRM Execution with StoreHero
StoreHero supports merchants on Shopify who want to increase sales by helping them execute growth initiatives thoroughly.
For CRM initiatives, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to deliver highly personalized operations — such as product recommendations and offer messaging via email, LINE, and account pages based on customers' purchase history, attribute data, and product/SKU performance and inventory data — that are difficult to achieve through manual processes, along with large-scale campaign execution to drive continuous growth.
We currently offer a free store diagnosis. If you have challenges with CRM or growth initiatives in general, please reach out. =>Learn more about our free store diagnosis here
Summary
We hope you now have a clear understanding of how to design CRM scenarios that grow your loyal customer base. Use the three-step design method introduced in this article to maximize the impact of your CRM efforts.
StoreHero supports business growth using an automated system that combines Shopify with growth initiatives. If you would like to work on growth strategies alongside our Shopify and growth experts, please do not hesitate to contact us.