You’ve done it.
After working tirelessly to market your eCommerce store and products, someone makes a purchase.
Great! You deserve a pat on the back.
But after they’ve made that purchase, what happens next?
Is it one of those, “Thanks for purchasing, ba-bye now,” and then they don’t get so much as a peep out of you?
What happens post-purchase is almost as important as any other of your marketing efforts because you’re still influencing how your customer perceives your value as a brand.
And this, in turn, impacts your profit margins.
How so? Two words:
Repeat Customers.
Past customers are easier to convert into repeat customers and spend 300% more money on average than new customers.
But in order to get repeat customers, we must strategically continue the conversations after they’ve made that purchase to increase their Lifetime Order Value (LTV) — an important metric for every eCommerce store.
So if you want to make more money from repeat customers without spending more in doing so, then Post-Purchase emails can help you do just that!
Here are a few important types of emails you can add to your post-purchase funnel.
For brick and mortar stores, a part of good customer service and relationship building is being courteous and saying “thank you.”
It’s pretty much Manners 101.
However, in a digital world where we don’t have a lot of real human interaction, we sometimes forget that we still need to say it after someone purchases something from our brand.
A post-purchase thank you email sent right after an order can help you do that, but you don’t need to overthink it.
Saying a simple “Thank you for your purchase” is easy setup and send, plus covers it a lot of ground in gaining trust for new customers. Even for a repeat customer, saying thank you is always polite.
You can use these emails, like the example used here, to guide a customer through what to do next and what to expect from you or regarding the product.
In doing so, you add value to your brand while showing your customers that you’re committed to a long relationship with them.
Usually, someone who buys from you knows enough about your brand to be comfortable enough to buy from you. This type of email is designed to build on what your new customers know about your brand already.
You can do this one of two ways.
- Have an email built into your post-purchase funnel, or
- Have a welcome email funnel designed to trigger a few days after a purchase is made, and only to a new customer
Thankfully, both are simple to do.
With the first, you can add this email type as the second email in your funnel.
For the second, as you see with TOMs shoes here, you’ll need a well built welcome email funnel set to trigger one day after someone makes a purchase. Doing so gives you a chance to say both “Thank You” and “Welcome to our brand.”
While this does give you more of a chance to double down on the telling more about your brand and building it up through email, it can take a bit more effort to get the timing right so that customers aren’t getting too many emails from you all at once.
Whichever direction you decide to take it, do your best to show/tell what makes your brand unique and what their purchase is helping you do.
If you want to turn a customer into a repeat buyer, then you shouldn’t leave it up to chance.
Product recommendation emails are a great addition to a post-purchase funnel.
And depending on your marketing automation and email marketing provider, you can do even better with personalized offerings instead.
Even if it doesn’t, you can make it seem as though the product recommendations are personalized.
Take this email from Sephora for example. The main heading says, “Top Picks Just For You”.
The way they’ve designed it means they probably don’t need this email to be personalized based on user data. However, the copy automatically implies there are personalized choices here which does the trick well enough.
Going this route can be particularly helpful when you don’t have much data to base a recommendation on. Of course, we recommend moving over to using customer behavior data to recommend products as they go through their on-going customer journey.
But this can be a great place for you to start while also offer suggestions to encourage repeat sales. You can send this 3-7 days after purchase and then another again 10-20 days after that if you like.
As mentioned earlier, if you want to gain repeat customers, then you need to be putting in the effort by making offerings that are enticing enough.
And nothing is quite as enticing as a discount.
I love them.
You love them.
And your customers definitely love them too.
There’s something about getting a product you already like for an even better price. Adding a discount email to your post-purchase funnel is pretty straight forward.
Simply include a special discount code (preferably one that’s unique to this funnel so you can track effectiveness), and trigger it to send a 7-12 days after your first email.
Test using copy like “A special discount just for you” or “We love you! Here’s X% off your next purchase”.
Why say this or something to this effect?
Simple: It makes the customer feel special like they’re the only ones getting this discount.
Too often, people spend a whole day going unappreciated and overlooked.
It’s frustrating.
Adding this sort of sentiment to your copy in these post-purchase emails can tug at that emotional need — plus, it’s nice to make people feel good.
Before you place an offer in your email though, it’s always a good idea to make sure the offer doesn’t put you in the red. If not, it’s worth a test to see how this can increase return customers and their LTV.
What do people think of your products?
It’s pretty important to find out if you want to lower returns, find areas for improvement and gather reviews that you can place on your website to increase sales.
You can ask for an opinion or a review within your post-purchase funnel. You can send this one 7-10 days after your first email which should give plenty of time for the product to ship to them.
It’s understandable to feel some hesitation here. Getting any negative feedback can really hit ya in the feels.
But don’t let fear hold you back.
Gathering reviews to show on your website or feedback can have a huge impact on gathering new customers and helping sell other products to current customers and increase LTV.
You can a CTA with a link to a survey, or to a Facebook page to gather those reviews.
After about a month or so, you should have at least a few good reviews about your products that you can leverage in your social proof.
Want to hear a crazy statistic?
A small increase of 5% in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.
Post-purchase emails aim to help assist your brand in improving customer retention through return customers. And if they can make even a seemingly small increase can impact your revenue exponentially.
If you haven’t already, considering putting together a post-purchase email funnel together for your eCommerce store.
If you already have one, revisit it to see if you should test adding one or more of these types of emails to it.
It can take a bit of time and testing to find the right funnel flow for your brand. But the numbers don’t lie. It’s definitely worth trying out!