Director of Sales and Strategic Partnerships at ReadyCloud, the Shipping, Returns, Growth Marketing and CRM Suite built for eCommerce.
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Once you’ve enticed your customers to make a purchase, you’ve only made it halfway through a minor success. The second half is retaining your customers and turning them into regulars.
While most company leaders understand how necessary customer retention is, many might find it too hard to execute campaigns that keep customers happy and satisfied.
The first step to your post-purchase campaign is communication with the customer, and that’s where post-purchase emails come into play. A well-crafted and polite email expressing your thanks to the customer for their trust goes a long way.
In case you’re still skeptical about the power of e-commerce post-purchase email marketing, I’ll share some of the top ways reaching out can make a difference.
Positive And Welcoming Emails Can Boost Engagement
Once your customer has made a purchase, a “Thank you for your purchase” or “Welcome to our newsletter” email can help boost customer engagement. One estimate from a director of marketing showed a 42.5% boost in customer engagement.
In other words, these warm emails you send your customer to tell them that they’re communicating with another human being can generate five times as many clicks as regular marketing emails.
Another report by Mailchimp finds that regular e-commerce marketing emails generate an average click-through rate of about 2% across industries. According to SmartMail, thank you emails can generate an 18% click-through rate, on average.
Remember, first impressions matter, and that’s why you have to be careful with drafting the first post-purchase email you’ll send your customers. Start by thanking the customer and consider adding a coupon or discount code in there as a perk. Also, link to your social media because some customers might want to follow these.
Be especially careful with your subject lines because they matter. One estimate of data showed almost half of email recipients choose to open emails based on the subject line alone. So, make sure the subject line is short and clear. Don’t use a subject line that doesn’t fit in the page’s width. You can even include some witty wisecrack or a fun fact to test what impacts click-through rates.
Follow-Up Emails Increase Customer ROI
To help support the eventual return of your customers, you need first to give them a good experience. A positive experience is also a goal of post-purchase email marketing campaigns. Through follow-up emails, you can improve customer experience in simple yet efficient ways, such as confirming their order, telling them more about the product they purchased and how to use it, giving them incentives like discount codes, etc.
Order confirmation emails, in particular, can be a gold mine for retailers and marketers because of their engagement rates. One look at more than 12 million follow-up emails found a 65% average open rate and 10.4% click-through rate. Confirmation emails offer you a great chance to send your customer a valuable message, provide an incentive, share your social media links, ask them to rate their experience and more.
As simple as these elements sound, they’re highly effective. And just one of these elements can increase conversions. In the report on follow-up emails, the addition of one element increased conversions by up to 2,200% in the sample of 12 million emails. This shows there is a path to increasing customer ROI.
All of this effort is worth it in the end because leaving your customer satisfied means they’re likely to come back. For reference, a report by Harvard Business Review shows that customers who had a good experience with a company spent 140% more than those who had a poor experience.
You Can Reduce Return Costs
Since your customers are warm after making a purchase and ready to read useful information you share, you can also add an FAQ section to inform your customer about items including order tracking, cancellation policy, return policy and payment method.
If you don’t have much space for an FAQ in your email, you can put it on your website and link to it in the email. Just make sure your FAQ is informative and educates your customer about the product because product-educated customers can help decrease your return costs.
Recommend Your Other Products
When you look at a product online, you may notice inviting bits of copy such as “You May Also Like” or “Customers with Your Interests Also Buy ...” You often find these sections on e-commerce giants like Amazon. The reason for this is cross-selling and upselling.
For those who don’t know, cross-selling is selling a complementary item to the one you just bought, while upselling is selling higher quality, more expensive variants or alternatives to the product you just purchased.
It’s not hard to imagine how effective cross-selling and upselling can be. For example, imagine buying a phone on Amazon and then finding listings for cases for the exact model you need — that’s the perfect example of cross-selling done right.
Subtlety is also at the heart of product recommendations. But why does subtlety matter? Some customers find monetary incentives like promo codes and discounts too pushy because, to them, it looks like the company is trying to extract money from them.
But product recommendations are different — they’re not necessarily pushy, and they can be efficient. In fact, emails with product recommendations have a 100% higher conversion rate than those without one.
So, it’s not surprising to learn that in 2013, McKinsey found that 35% of Amazon’s revenue comes from cross-selling and upselling. While Amazon has continued to diversify revenue streams, their past success stands as an example to the power of cross-selling. Their success is not simply a result of their vast selection as regular companies can also generate additional revenue for every digital receipt or confirmation email containing cross-selling or upselling suggestions.
Let’s Wrap It All Up
As you can see, post-purchase email marketing can be an effective tool to increase customer retention rates and turn your customers into regulars who, through word of mouth and repeated purchases, can be crucial in expanding your business.
So go ahead and pick the relevant products you’d like to tell your customers about in post-purchase emails. You’ll soon see the results.
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