Did you know it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one? Once a customer has made the leap to make a purchase from you, the moments after said purchase can be pivotal. How the post-purchase moment is handled can separate your brand from becoming a trusted go-to, or, just another email in the customer’s inbox. So, what can you do to make the most out of your post-purchase communications? We’ve got you covered.
What are Post-Purchase emails?
Post-Purchase emails are exactly what you’d expect – an automated email that fires after a customer makes a purchase.
Post-Purchase emails not only provide your customers with important information about their orders, but they give you the opportunity to tell your customers more about your brand and products, and why they’ve made the right decision to shop with you. By doing so you can increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. When done well, Post-Purchase emails can help you:
- Tempt people to come back to your site
- Lay the groundwork for a repeat purchase
- Collect feedback from your customers
- Create an exceptional customer experience
The messaging in these emails can vary based on a number of things, including how long it’s been since the customer made their last purchase. For example, an order confirmation email would be sent immediately after a customer makes a purchase, whereas a product review request might come a couple of weeks after. These differing messages are what makes up a successful post-purchase email flow.
Developing a Post-Purchase series
You can develop your Post-Purchase emails beyond simple, transactional order confirmations into a series, crafting your messaging according to the stage of the customer journey. We’ve detailed some of the ways you might want to use your Post-Purchase Series to increase customer loyalty and provide value to your customers.
Review requests
You can use a Post-Purchase series as part of your strategy to collect customer reviews. You’ll want to plan the timing of these review requests. By this we mean, you’ll want to allow enough time to have passed that they have definitely received their order, but not too much that their excitement has petered out. Asking a customer to review a product while they’re still basking in the glory of their recent purchase, gives you the best opportunity to collect great reviews.
You can further encourage your customers to show you some love by incorporating incentives into your reviews strategy. By offering customers a reward for their engagement, not only do you stand a good chance of collecting a positive review, but you’ll encourage a follow up purchase. Very nice!
You might think about incorporating a reviews platform like Okendo or Reviews.io to help you in this process. Andzen are proficient at setting up review strategies with various reviews platforms, so we can help you put this together.
User-generated content
You can use your Post-Purchase series as an opportunity to develop your presence on social media and establish trust through social proof. Similar to your Review Requests, you can capitalise on the excitement a customer has for their recent purchase by asking for user-generated content at the optimum time. For example, you could ask customers to tag you in their content using your products 14 days after their order is fulfilled. This gives you enough time to ensure they have definitely received their product and are still feeling the excitement of their new purchase.
Replenishment reminders
A great way to encourage a repeat purchase is by setting up a Replenishment Reminder as part of your Post-Purchase series. You can set these up to fire when you predict someone might need to replenish their product. Klaviyo has an Expected Date of Next Purchase trigger, based on customer analytics, to take the guesswork out of this process and give you the best opportunity to convert. Capturing customer attention at the time when they might need to replenish their products might be just what they need to make a follow up purchase – we’re all busy so this helps the customer if they’ve simply forgotten to place an order.
Incentivise a repeat purchase
There are a number of really effective ways you can implement an incentive in your Post-Purchase series. For example, you might decide you want to acknowledge and reward your loyal customers with a special incentive offer for those who have made 5 or more purchases. The benefits of implementing something like this into your Post-Purchase strategy are twofold. One, you’re gifting your customers for their loyalty, thereby solidifying your relationship with them. And two, you’re giving an incentive to someone who is likely to convert. Happy days!
You could develop this strategy further by tiering incentive offers based on total placed order value, offering different incentives to customers based on how much they have spent with you over all time.
You could also look at this from the opposite perspective and offer an incentive to customers who are yet to make a follow up purchase. If you position your incentive offer to trigger once customers have made their way through the rest of the flow (and haven’t converted yet based on all of your other awesome content), using an incentive at that point might be just what they need to push them across the line. We can help you determine the best incentive strategy to suit the behaviour of your customers, thereby strengthening your relationship with them.
Need some help?
Creating a well-crafted Post-Purchase series is an essential step in the development of your customer journey. It helps you build brand trust and loyalty in the eyes of your customer base and is an essential component in your customer retention strategy. We would love to put together an outstanding Post-Purchase Series for you according to your business’ needs and goals, so reach out if you have any questions about how to get started!