MISTAKE #68: You under-value or over-estimate repeat purchase or loyalty

How much have you thought about the repeat purchase your new product will get?  Or the loyalty it will build over time?

Or are those metrics barely on your radar? 

Or just as bad, they’re shaped by complete speculation and unsupported assumptions.

Has your biased view convinced you that your product will become man's new best friend?  That your product will quickly find its place as part of the family of products shoppers can't live without?

Experienced companies know that repeat purchase is one of the absolute most important metrics to monitor.  A new product has to be designed to maximize keeping buyers after the first purchase.  This is where the ongoing, sustainable volume will need to come from if your product wants to survive.

Without repeat purchases, money and effort will have to be continually spent to attract next quarter’s sales…and it will quickly become less and less effective as most prime prospects have been exhausted and you’re trying to attract second and third-tier buyer profiles.

Failure to achieve reasonable repurchase can be an early warning sign of other issues your product needs to address.  Five of these warning signs include:

You set wrong or false expectations:  Put bluntly, products are most often not repurchased because they failed to deliver the desired benefits or results in the time they were expected.  Be careful with the selling license you apply to your marketing message.  Inflated promises that get more people to buy your product for the first time could also cause no one to buy it a second time.

Your usage or consumption experience is poor:  Great ideas aren’t always executed as well as expected.  Consumers frequently skip following (or even reading) all the instructions.  The best product in the world will disappoint if it is not used the way it was designed.  This is a particularly big risk for products that are more complicated or require more education.

The purchase cycle might be longer than you anticipated:  The amount and rate that products are consumed rarely mirrors what the manufacturer recommends.  While this sometimes plays in their favor, products are just as likely to linger half-used or be used interchangeably with other products that delay the need to buy more.  And then there can be a delay in time from using up a non-essential product to making the next purchase, which tends to increase the more expensive the product is.

The competitive response might be stronger or faster than expected:  Surprising to some, competition notices when shoppers stop buying their product and start buying a new product.  The most aggressive ones will act fast and with force to win back the next purchase.  While they might not be able to drown out initial curiosity about your new product, they can create lots of incentives to welcome people back if your product was anything less than an exceptionally better experience.  If this is the case, prepare for a longer, harder-fought battle than what you might have planned.

Those more likely to try your product might be more likely to try any new product:  One unspoken paradox of new product launches is the fact that the earliest and easiest trial doesn’t just come from prime prospects that are most dissatisfied with current options.  The early trial also tends to include a large number of disloyal, unreliable shoppers that jump around from product to product based on whatever is most interesting or giving them the most incentive at the moment (i.e. buying whatever is on promotion).  Trying to earn repeat purchases from this group is likely only temporary and ultimately futile.

DON’T MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF

Hopefully, this has provided a brief, but somewhat insightful and compelling argument for why maximizing repeat purchases has to be a core part of your optimization plan. 

Not sure how to predict or measure repeat purchases?  Do you still have time to refine your product to increase the likelihood of repeat?

We do this as part of our product and package refinement service and would be happy to help get your product in a better position to transition initial sales into repeat purchases and eventually loyal buyers.