Humans are judgemental creatures. Within seven seconds of meeting someone, they will have formed a detailed and solid opinion of you. This includes views on how trustworthy, competent and likeable you are.

If you're an online grocery retailer, you may get a bit more time to make a good first impression. Miss the mark, though, and you've missed out on creating a loyal, long-term customer.

The chance to build loyalty

Symphony RetailAI has just analysed 421 million baskets' worth of Q1 2021 sales data across the US and Europe. The findings make for interesting reading, as Mark Rogers, VP of Growth at Northfork, points out:

"Grocery retailers have very little time to impress new customers. The Symphony RetailAI research shows a direct correlation between the first three months of activity for a new customer and their likelihood of long-term loyalty. This highlights how important it is for retailers to deliver best-in-class grocery shopping experiences that impress new customers rapidly."

Symphony RetailAI found that shoppers who return seven times to an online grocery retailer in the first three months are 3.4 times more likely to turn into long-term customers than those who visit only twice.

Reasons to keep coming back

If you only have three months to influence shoppers' long-term behaviour so fundamentally, you need to get things right. That means delivering a shopping experience that's convenient, frictionless and effective. Do that, and your customers will come back for more. With online retail, convenience drives loyalty, which drives spend. Your loyal customers will spend more. We've seen this with recipe shopping driving up cart values. As a result of the frictionless recipe shopping experience, conversions are higher. "It's all about making the shopper's life easier, with service that shines," concludes Northfork's Mark Rogers. "That's the key to unlocking long-term potential with your first impressions."