Customer retention marketing is vital to create repeat purchases and increase future purchases. Without it, it’s difficult to keep the customers you’ve already spent money on acquiring.

And the online dietary supplement industry is one that is built on continuity and retention. Customers are making multiple purchases over time. Often month after month for the same bottle of supplement.

Studies show that it costs ten times more to generate a new customer than it does to maintain an existing one.

If your health supplement company only has a small number of customers, losing a few could cripple you. And, if you have a ton of customers, a small increase in your customer retention rate will dramatically increase your profit.

In either case, every marketer should be very focused on not only retaining their customers, but also growing them over time.

There are many ways to maximize customer retention marketing for a dietary supplement company.

We’ve worked with several successful direct response dietary supplement companies.

Here are the top 6 that we’ve seen and recommend. Believe it or not, none of the clients we’ve worked with are using all of these tactics together.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 1 – Transactional Emails

The first of the 6 retention marketing tactics is one that is vastly underutilized. When a customer buys from you they typically get an immediate email with their receipt. This is known as a transactional email since it was triggered by the customer transacting with your website.

The opportunity here is in that very first email. Normally it only includes the receipt for their order and nothing else. But if you also include reviews about the products they just bought it will reinforce their purchase decision and get them to stick longer.

Another opportunity in transactional emails is to cross sell them other products. Most marketers stop selling at this point thinking they have just made a sale but this is when the buyer is most likely to buy again.

There are two ways to approach cross selling in transactional emails.

Soft-sell – Which entices them with educational content and then takes them to a blog post or presell page soft selling them before clicking through to a funnel.

Hard-sell – Which puts a new related product right in front of them in the email itself direct to an order page or cart page, for an immediate purchase. This can even be a product they just saw as an up-sell in the funnel they just purchased through. Similar to a second chance option.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 2 – New Customer Email Followup Sequence

Many retention programs fail because they assume the customer will take their product regularly. Without reinforcement the customers commitment will naturally wane and retention suffers as a result.

Email follow up sequences are where commitment to taking your supplement daily can be reinforced. Using email to do this is like adding an additional level of support that many dietary supplement companies are compleatly missing.

This includes regular checkins, prompting short surveys to get additional data.

Additional digital content like a printable journal to track their changes over time and even surprise bonuses like special reports and digital courses to further educate and reenforce their decision.

As a side note, giving customers lifetime access to such a digital bonus surprise gives you an excuse to email them with reminders that they have access to it.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 3 – Retargeting For Customer Retention

Most companies only think of retargeting as a way to get prospects back who haven’t bought from them yet.

But retargeting can also be used to boost customer retention. By retargeting brand related content to existing customers close to the time the made a purchase or received they first bottle.

With reminders, such as, “Have you taken your x-brand supplement today?” or content around how their body should be reacting to the supplement they “should” be taking.

With this strategy you stay top of mind and continue to remind them even without a click to your content.

To amplify this, simply combine retargeting new customers with your email follow up sequence. Simply retarget related content or the same supportive content you’re already delivering via email.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 4 – Direct Mail

Ironically, direct mail is a very under utilized channel for customer retention marketing. Online dietary supplement companies are in the direct response space so you’d think they would also be using the medium where it all started.

Direct mail is ripe for retention strategy. Dentist have been using it for years as appointment reminders. It can work the same way for dietary supplements.

There are literally hundreds of options including:

Postcard reminders not only to continue taking it but to order more
Coupons & rewards for sticking with a supplement past a certain amount of months
Sample products that compliment what they are already taking
Notifications about webinar events, etc. to reinforce their learning to get the to stick longer
Even blog articles can simply be printed and mailed to a test to a segment

The sky is the limit on creativity here. From sticky notes to personalize a message or call out something specific all the way to lumpy mail grabbers.

But, you’ll want to segment customers to keep costs down if you’re dealing with large volume. Sending direct mail to only the best customers with the highest life time value.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 5 – Inside The Box Marketing

You’re already sending them a box of supplements why not customize the shipment to include specific content?

By adding additional helpful information about the product they purchased.

Some things you can include is a one page sheet on how to take your supplement.

How it works (don’t assume they remember from reading your sales letter).

As well as marketing materials, like invitations to evergreen webinars and much more.

Customer Retention Marketing Tactic 6 – Loyalty Programs

Customer retention marketing seems to be hand made for online loyalty programs.

There are many third party companies that have plug and play solutions. Each of which can be offered as bonuses to get them to stick longer, in addition to special discounts to your best customers.

No matter which tactic you choose or even if you choose to layer several tactics together, we always recommend A/B testing your efforts. Not only to understand what works with your audience but also to improve the performance of each tactic over time.

At the very least if you don’t A/B test retention, you’ll want to track how effective each one of these strategies are for you so you can double down on what’s working.

Customer retention marketing is such a big part of the backend success with a dietary supplement businesses that it should not be overlooked.