Retention works. Companies say that 65% to 75% of their business comes from their existing customers. Post-purchase automation is one of the most crucial strategies to achieve this feat.
Companies spend between 8% and 20% of their revenue on marketing and 10% on customer support. Not to mention business spending on product development, user experience, supply chain management, and inventory management. That’s a lot of expenses! However, only 30% of first-time buyers end up buying again.
Companies need to implement effective post-purchase strategies to solve this. A post-purchase strategy focuses on turning first-time buyers into loyal and repeat customers. For this strategy to take off, you must approach customers individually.
Doing everything manually, however, can take too much effort. This is especially true if you have thousands of customers. Fortunately, there are advanced tools to automate the work.
This article will discuss the post-purchase journey and explore the solution: post-purchase automation. Whether you run a startup or a large corporation, the tips and tools here will help re-engage your customers. Read on!
What is a Customer Journey?
When crafting a post-purchase strategy, you should consider the entire customer journey. The customer journey is the process or cycle a customer goes through before, during, and after buying a product. Also called the buyer’s journey, businesses use this framework to adjust marketing and sales to customer needs.
When mapping out customer journeys, businesses look at the buyer personas to personalize their approach further. Buyer personas are the standard “characters” businesses see in their customers. These are fictional yet real personalities that represent a company’s target markets.
Companies spend time and effort understanding buyer personas to create a customer journey map. By understanding each customer, businesses can optimize the strategies that work for specific market segments.
Every step in the customer journey matters, but the post-purchase stage is the most critical. In the next section, let’s explore why and how it makes a difference.
The Post-Purchase Customer Journey
The post-purchase customer journey is a part of the customer map that highlights what happens after a customer buys. Often, it requires a good order confirmation workflow.
An order confirmation workflow is a process you take when a customer places an order. Aside from informing the customer that the order has been received, its goal is to encourage customers to buy again. An order confirmation workflow doesn’t end with sending a confirmation email.
Instead, you need to facilitate customer feedback collection to address possible concerns after the order arrives. It also helps you measure customer satisfaction and determine how well you implement your services. You can use surveys, feedback from third-party review sites (e.g., TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.), and other key metrics to measure.
The entire customer journey involves pre-purchase marketing for weeks (or months) after an order. Meanwhile, the post-purchase journey is important to keep customers engaged with your products or services. Here’s why.
Why Foster a Good Post-Purchase Customer Journey?
Acquiring new customers can be five to seven times more expensive than keeping your existing ones. Below are the key reasons why:
- Sufficient data is available. New customers are people you don’t have data about yet. Without enough information to work around, you cannot predict accurate strategies for each kind of customer. Meanwhile, old customers already know about your brand: how it works, how to use it, and more.
- Previous customers are less time-consuming. Because old customers already know about your product, they’re more likely to repurchase it. You don’t have to answer many queries; misunderstandings are less likely.
- You will benefit from word-of-mouth. When someone buys your product and meets their expectations, they’ll recommend your business to others. The new customers they bring in do not cost you direct marketing expenses. They’re more likely to trust you because a close friend or relative is confident in your products.
- Accumulate more customers while spending less. The extra budget you spend to acquire a new buyer will continue to give you profit for a long time. This means that the return on investment for one customer will eventually outweigh the cost you spent on them.
While you should continue acquiring new customers continually, don’t forget about your existing customers. Invest in post-purchase automation to make new customers loyal buyers. Read on to the next section to learn how.
How to Re-engage Your Customers After Buying?
Provided that you have great products and services, getting customers to buy again should only take a little encouragement. In general, you want to motivate them without being too pushy. Otherwise, you will only turn your customers off.
The best post-purchase automation strategy still depends on what kind of customer you’re targeting. Here are 10 of the most effective ways to re-engage customers after buying:
Send Thank You Emails
Thank-you emails are often included within an order confirmation workflow, which contains the following:
- Order confirmation heading – Explicitly confirms that the order has been received.
- “Thank you” note – Sending gratitude for buying a product.
- Order summary and shipping details – Product ID, date and time of placement, payment, and estimated arrival
Aside from confirming an order, thanking a customer is also important to keep them engaged. It makes customers feel valued and likely to become regular buyers.
You can also send a “thank you” email along with product recommendations, review requests, and other promotional letters. Consistently showing gratitude can create a positive brand image and reflect your business’s values.
Automate Shipping Updates
Shipping update automation prevents miscommunication between you and the buyer. This is especially important if you run an online shop on an independent website. Running your site requires buyers to check the website constantly, unlike e-commerce platforms that have built-in order trackers.
However, even if you run your shop on an e-commerce platform, personally sending shipping updates gives a sense of accountability. Customers won’t have to visit the site; you provide the updates yourself.
Ask for a Review
Customer feedback collection lets you know whether a customer had a positive or negative experience. This way, you’ll know what to improve and what it would take to keep a customer.
Positive reviews, on the other hand, serve as social proof to attract new customers. As buyers write their reviews, it also reminds them of how great their experience was with the product or service. Not to mention, it gives customers a sense that they’re part of the story and success of your brand.
After collecting reviews, replying is important, too. Depending on the volume of purchases, it can be hard to ask for reviews and reply to everything after. Fortunately, you can use review request automation strategies for that:
- Post-purchase SMS and email – Integrate automated messaging with your shop to send letters to customers after a purchase.
- In-app pop-ups – If you use an e-commerce app, you can request a review within the platform every time an order arrives.
- Scheduled posts on social media – Some businesses request a review on their social media accounts so the public can see it.
- Website widgets – If you run your business via your website, you can design a widget to collect customer feedback for every completed purchase.
Organize Returns and Refunds Process
Just because a customer returns a product doesn’t mean they won’t buy it anymore. Instead, when you provide a good refund policy, it will just encourage them to buy again. 95% of customers who like a company’s refund process will likely retry purchasing.
Returns and refunds serve as a warranty for your product’s quality. It gives people confidence that they can always undo the purchase when unsatisfied. Depending on the process, your sales return policy can attract or make a buyer hesitant during post-purchase automation.
You should make it easy for people to return items by setting up a standard process and a handling center for self-service returns. Here are the best practices to establish a good return and refund policy:
- Provide a clear, step-by-step return process on your website.
- Use printable QR codes to let customers drop packages quickly.
- Create a standard communication channel between your customer service, returns team, and finance department.
- Ensure there’s a field for customer feedback collection to know what went wrong with the returned order.
Send Purchase Reminders
Timing in purchase reminders is important in post-purchase automation. This is especially true for perishables (mostly foods) and consumables (e.g., cosmetics, papers). These products run out, so customers are likely to buy them regularly. All you have to do is predict when your customers’ supply will last and send them a reminder when that time arrives.
You can also use subscription services to encourage buyers to become loyal. For instance, you can offer monthly replenishment for skincare products, attracting buyers with busy schedules.
Still, consider how you craft purchase reminders. Be sure it goes to primary emails, where your customer will likely notice it. Fortunately, there are ways you can prevent your emails from going to the promotions tab.
Recommend Products That Complement the Buyer’s Purchase
What better way to encourage a purchase than to recommend a pair of earbuds to someone who bought a phone? That’s just one example of a cross-sell strategy. By offering a product that matches what the customer usually buys, you can encourage customers to try more of your products.
You can also try bundling products (e.g., selling soaps with shampoos in a package). Bundles often convince customers that they’ll eventually buy the complementary product anyway. So, they might as well buy both products at once with a discount.
Offer Referral Discounts and Bonuses
Referral discounts are a two-in-one strategy, encouraging the referrer and the person referred to with a discount. When offering referral discounts, be sure to provide clear program terms. Take note of these key questions that the program should answer:
- What are the rewards? How much discount do you give per successful purchase?
- How to get started?
- Is there an expiration date for the referral code?
- Can the referrer transfer the rewards to other users?
- Is there any reward for the person I referred to?
Invite Your Customers to a Reward Program
Post-purchase automation won’t be complete without rewards. Reward programs increase customer engagement by letting them earn and redeem rewards. As they invest time in getting those rewards, they will also be encouraged to buy again for discounts.
You can use loyalty programs to reward customers who regularly buy from your store. The rewards can offer vouchers, points, early access, and many more. For more ideas, take a look at the common rewards that brands use nowadays:
- Cashback – This lets customers earn back a portion of the purchase amount. They can use the cashback reward to offset the price of their next purchase.
- Buy One, Get One – This is a form of bundling, but you can also offer it exclusively in loyalty programs. You can offer two of the same products for a discounted price.
- Loyalty cards – A physical card that many brick-and-mortar stores have. After a one-time payment, loyalty cards let users earn points for every purchase and get discounts next time. The longer and more often they use it, the bigger the points. Thus, customers are always motivated to buy.
- Early access to products – It’s a great loyalty reward for entertainment and gaming businesses. By letting loyal subscribers experience the newest releases, they feel special and stay loyal.
- VIP tiers – This is an excellent strategy to pair with loyalty cards. VIP tiers can further customer engagement as users level up and get more rewards.
- Birthday, anniversary, and other events coupons – Offer exclusive rewards to loyal customers during their special days and holiday season. You can couple it with VIP tiers, with customers getting more rewards depending on their tier.
Be creative; you can always experiment with reward combos. Don’t forget to trace your discount expenses to ensure that your overall profits still outweigh the rewards.
Send Great Content
You can also use company blogs or newsletters to keep customers engaged. Don’t just send regular emails; hitting your customers’ pain points and unique needs is better.
Since you’re eyeing a repeat purchase, you already have the customer’s initial data to personalize your email. For instance, if the customer bought a camera, you can recommend an article about photography tips and camera care.
You can also use product recommendation automation along with the content you send. Taking the example above, you can recommend tripods, filters, or camera straps. Take note of this key information and tips for good content during post-purchase automation:
- Use the customer’s first name in the opening line. Example: “Hey, Alison!”
- Provide educational and informative content.
- You may also include exclusive offers in the email.
- Share customer reviews, forum Q&A, stories, and other customer content.
- Send surveys, polls, puzzles, quizzes, and other interactive content.
- Give your customers a “behind-the-scenes” sneak peek at your team’s process, values, and other activities that make customers feel involved.
Engage in Customer Communities
You can send invites to communities using post-purchase automation. Communities include Q&A forums, rewards programs, and entertainment. Q&A forums help you save time on answering customer queries by letting users help each other.
Meanwhile, entertainment channels let customers interact and share experiences with your product. Google, for instance, has a search community where people ask about issues on their accounts.
Another good example of a customer community is a membership signup. You can encourage first-time buyers to join a membership program for exclusive deals, coupons, and rewards. In addition, they meet a pool of like-minded people at virtual or on-site events.
For small-scale businesses, you don’t have to be extravagant. You can use platforms like Reddit, Facebook Groups, X (Twitter) Spaces, and Instagram Channels to connect with customers.
Recommended Tools to Use for Post-Purchase Automation
Engaging customers after buying doesn’t need to be hard. Many post-purchase automation tools can work on everything instantly. Often, such platforms are not free but worthy. Here are five of the best tools to use in post-purchase automation:
Customer.io (Starts at $100/month; Free for Startups) |
| Customer.io is an all-in-one customer journey tool that works from the order confirmation workflow to regular newsletters. It also helps you segment customers to personalize your emails. You can integrate Customer.io with many business tools like Google Analytics, Slack, Facebook, and other platforms you use to store and send out data. |
Narvar (Demo-based) |
| Narvar is a shipping update automation platform that tracks products from shipping out to the refund process. It’s a good tool to invest in for returns and refund streamlining, as Narvar handles a self-service return pickup without much effort on your part. It also works on tracking, notifying, and monitoring orders on the road for you and the customer. |
Yotpo (Starts at $0) |
| Yotpo is a post-purchase automation service that focuses on curating user-generated content. Here, you can showcase ratings and reviews from other customers to convince new users of your high-quality services. Yotpo also has great review request automation strategies, automatically collecting, organizing, and replying to feedback to increase customer engagement. |
Criteo (Demo-based) |
| Criteo is a commerce growth and AI customer retention platform. It has advanced product recommendation automation that analyzes the behaviors of over 750 million users across 4 billion products online. Criteo claims to encourage repeat purchases by up to 27% with its personalized product recommendations. |
Customer Thermometer (Starts at $29/month) |
| Customer Thermometer is a unique and advanced platform for measuring customer satisfaction. It offers engaging surveys that customers can easily answer via email. Customer Thermometer has one-click review features, vast emoji libraries, and visual reports to make feedback collection and analysis understandable at a glance. |
Finding the right tool depends on the purpose and area you want to focus on. However, you still need to check and manage the content that automated tools provide. Relying entirely on automation leads to common mistakes businesses make in the post-purchase journey. Without further ado, let’s tackle them one by one.
Don’ts in Post-Purchase Automation: What Shoos Customers Away?
A good post-purchase engagement strategy can keep loyal customers for a long time. However, doing it wrong may discourage them from repurchasing instead. When planning post-purchase automation, always put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Would you be delighted to receive that email? Or would it make you feel annoyed or offended?
One wrong move can quickly lose you one potential loyal customer. To avoid it, avoid these common mistakes in your post-purchase strategy:
Don’t Send Too Many Messages
Your customers know you’ve messaged them; you don’t need to send them repurchase reminders daily. If they want or need your product, they will buy it again. Discounts, promotional letters, and customer feedback collection are just there to give customers an extra push to buy.
Don’t Ignore Your Customers’ Wants
If someone bought a pair of gardening gloves, don’t throw random skating shoes in the recommendations (unless their data suggests they might be into skating, too). Avoid sending a generalized email; use their name, address, gender, and other personal details about them instead.
Also, let your customers opt out of your emails. Give them a clear and easy way to stop your regular messages, and include it in each email. Otherwise, people will have a negative connotation for your brand.
Don’t Disregard Negative Feedback
Recognizing negative feedback is as important as displaying your customers’ positive experiences. It can humanize your business and let users know you’re always working to improve your weaknesses. 96% of people who read reviews specifically look for negative feedback.
You have nothing to hide as long as you acknowledge and answer concerns. After all, not everyone will like your business. Some users value trust and transparency in the businesses they support.
Don’t Send Emails Immediately
Timing is important in post-purchase automation, so don’t send emails at random times. For instance, a common timing mistake businesses make is asking for a review right after the order arrives. Please don’t do this; give your customers enough time to use the product before they send you feedback.
Likewise, don’t rush to send product recommendations. Paydays, holidays, birthdays, and other similar seasons are great times to send purchase reminders and suggestions.
Don’t Rely On Bot Supports
Customer support is important to many users nowadays. Over 80% of buyers will likely repurchase if they receive good customer support. Bot replies won’t provide this, as each customer has unique concerns that simple FAQs cannot address.
Be sure you have enough customer service representatives to handle the volume of concerns each day. Email customer service is good, but in-app or website chats are even better. Couple it with bot support to inform the sender that a representative will get back to them.
Bottomline
Post-purchase automation is an essential part of a customer journey. It lets you stay in touch with customers who will buy again and keep sales flowing. Once you’ve converted a regular customer, you could spend less on marketing to newer audiences and focus on customer retention, which is way cheaper.
Personalization, transparency, and valuable content are critical factors for an excellent post-purchase strategy. Ensure your emails are worth people’s time by giving them useful information and deals they can’t refuse. To do so, you can use automation tools that quicken the process.
Timing is the key when crafting post-purchase strategies. There’s a right time to send special deals, remind them to buy again, and ask for feedback. Otherwise, people will find your emails annoying and stay away from buying.
