Last Thursday we hosted Cambridge's first Shopify Plus Meetup, themed around best-practice eCommerce customer retention.

We felt it was important to host an event around customer retention in modern eCommerce, as acquiring a new customer is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining a existing one. With that being said, we teamed up with the Shopify Plus team, Klaviyo and LoyaltyLion, to deliver an insightful afternoon of eCommerce customer retention.

A big thanks to The Bradfield Centre, for letting us host the inaugural Shopify meetup in Cambridge, and for helping make it a huge success alongside our partners. We were fortunate enough to have a plethora of Shopify Plus merchants attend, all looking to learn more about how best to retain their customers and create loyal brand advocates.

In total we had 5 speakers, each from market-leading experts about various topics to support customer retention:

• George Linton - Marketing Manager @ BAO: Lifecyle Marketing
• Matthias Kleven & Steph Mason - Sales Executives EMEA @ Shopify Plus: Utilising Shopify Flow
• Phil Greenwood - Channel Manager @ Klaviyo: Owned Marketing
• Kerri Barnes - Partnerships Manager @ LoyaltyLion - Loyalty is strategically linked to conversion and customer experience
• Etienne Espenner - Co-Founder @ Purelei - Merchant Talk

The talks were followed by a solid Q&A with all of the above, giving attendees the opportunity to ask any direct questions they may have.

A special thank you is owed to Etienne from Purelei. Purelei are one of our Plus merchants and over the course of the three years that we've worked them, they've grown into one of the most influential merchants on Shopify Plus. Etienne travelled over from their HQ in Germany to present and gave an outstanding talk about customer retention from a brand's perspective and some insight into how Purelei have managed to build such a large, devoted customer base.

We hope that all in attendance learnt more about how best to retain existing customers and left feeling motivated to grow their eCommerce businesses!

We're delighted how our first event went, especially as we'll be throwing more in the new year. Watch this space and stay tuned for more details!