Post-purchase interaction is one of the most underrated elements of the customer experience. Brands often focus their efforts on acquiring new customers. Yet, they fail to build a strong post-purchase strategy to retain existing customers.
Over time, retaining customers more prominently can help cut marketing costs, increase repeat sales, and draw better ROI. Hence, boosting your bottom-line growth. However, retaining a customer is far from easy. It requires a deep understanding of their priorities to personalize the buying experience.
What is a Post-Purchase Strategy?
A post-purchase strategy ensures that customers will keep coming back to you for repeated purchases. As soon as a customer makes a sale, keeping them engaged becomes a priority. Some examples include product recommendations, order confirmation notifications, and order tracking.
For an impressive unboxing experience, it is key to personalize the packaging. This makes it easy to stand out from the competition. And in case of any mishaps, having a clear and transparent shipping policy comes in handy. Here’s a shipping policy template to get you started.
Post-Purchase Strategy #1: Reward Customer Loyalty
A good business knows how to keep incurring new customers. But a great business knows the value of loyal ones. Encouraging and rewarding your customers to remain loyal to your brand can work wonders, especially in such a highly competitive market.
It costs 5-25 times more to bring a new customer in than to maintain an existing one. In fact, the probability of landing a sale with a new lead is merely 5-20%. Whereas, for existing customers, the number shoots up to 60-70%.
Rewarding your customers’ loyalty lets them know that you appreciate them and want to keep engaging with them. To do this, you can offer special discounts and coupons, free VIP membership, early access to special content, free samples of a new product, and more.
Post-Purchase Strategy #2: Follow-up with Emails and Feedback Surveys
A great way to study your customers’ shopping experience is to simply ask them. To do this, you can set up an automated follow-up emailer. After a customer places an order, they will instantly receive an email. This can include a special greeting along with a request to fill out a feedback survey.
This helps you know what exactly it is that your customers are looking for to optimize the shopping experience accordingly. Customers can easily rate their shopping experience, write product reviews, and even make complaints if the product was found faulty.
With all this data, you can figure out which strategies are working and which aren’t. This helps avoid wasting resources on things that are not generating ROI and expand investment on things that are. In addition, asking for your customers’ opinion makes them feel valued.
Post-Purchase Strategy #3: Avoid Cart Abandonment
Here’s a not-so-fun fact. About 70% of shoppers do not complete their transaction, leaving behind an abandoned shopping cart. No seller wants their customers to leave their site empty-handed right at the last minute. Especially after already having selected the items they wanted to buy.
Fortunately, there are ways to fix this. Prompting reminders and offers to shoppers who have left an abandoned cart can help you gain back quite a few of those unmade deals. Thus, helping you increase the conversion rate and boosts sales.
Post-Purchase Strategy #4: Create Guides and Demos
If it’s not obvious to the consumer how to use your product after they bought it, they may end up unsatisfied and leave a bad review. This is bad news for your business. To avoid this, it is advisable to create instructional how-to guides, user manuals, and product demos.
This helps your customer learn how to use the product the way it was intended and gain maximum utility out of it. This way, you ensure that a customer is never let down by their purchase simply because they couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
Post-Purchase Strategy #5: Use Referral/Affiliate Marketing
A satisfied customer is a business’s biggest asset. According to some surveys, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. And 50% of all purchasing decisions are based on referrals. This is a huge opportunity for you to turn your satisfied customers into your very own salespersons.
Affiliate offers and referrals help realize this. Referral marketing is when your customers recommend your brand and products to their family and friends. Affiliate marketing is a more direct approach, but mostly similar.
Under this, a third party earns a commission when someone makes a purchase through their affiliate link. You can set up reward points for every purchase a new customer makes via your existing customer’s referral. As a result, this motivates them to keep sending new customers your way.
Post-Purchase Strategy #6: Master Returns and Shipping
While returns and refunds are never fun for any business, how you handle them can make a big difference. According to a study, 83% of the buyers read the return policy before purchasing a product. Hence, devising a transparent return policy is key to protect you and your customer.
Customers don’t like uncertainty. Having the peace of mind that a faulty product will be replaced or returned turns them more likely to make a purchase. But they may still hesitate to buy due to added shipping charges. Offering free shipping ensures the customer that they are only paying for the product they are going to use.
Post-Purchase Strategy #7: Set up Omnichannel Customer Support
Customers use a diverse range of platforms. From brick-and-mortar stores to social media, from eCommerce websites to third-party marketplaces. Having to switch between these platforms is a cumbersome task that no customer wants to do. Omnichannel support solves this problem.
Omnichannel customer support puts customers at the center of all communication channels. In other words, it integrates all the channels of commerce to share information and updates with each other. This helps provide a seamless customer experience.
For instance, a customer raising a product replacement request at your offline store can see the same request in your mobile app. From there, they can easily track the order and make adjustments according to their needs, and even view the progress on your website as well.
Post-Purchase Strategy #8: Promote UGC Marketing
User-generated content (UGC) is any piece of content on the web created by a user, not a brand. These can include fan art, product reviews, podcasts, blog posts, videos, and more. The reason why UGC is a great post-purchase strategy is that it allows your customers to share their experiences directly with new leads.
For instance, a satisfied customer posting a photo or video with your product on their social media channels is an excellent example of UGC marketing. Repurposing UGC means you don’t have to spend time and resources to create new content.
In addition, it also acts as great evidence to new leads that your product is reliable. To encourage your customers to create and share UGC, you can offer special store credit, discounts, or other offers on their next purchase.
A Killer Post-Purchase Strategy for a Killer Customer Experience
Ecommerce is a highly competitive market. What's seen is sold. This makes sense considering how the average attention span of a customer is merely eight seconds. To tackle such rising competition, it is crucial to retain your loyal customers. Sustaining more lasting relationships ensures continued growth.
In fact, 80% of customers say that the experience a brand provides is as important as the product itself. 66% of customers say they feel like they’re treated as numbers, not people. Hence, enhancing your customers' post-purchase experience can help develop close relationships and preserve a happy customer for years to come. Find best mobile app development companies for E-commerce solution.
This post is published by Adeendren Iyan.
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