Communicating with your customers post-purchase can go a long way in capitalizing on purchase intent—but many ecommerce brands are missing out. According to Shopify, an existing customer has an 80% chance of buying from your brand again, whereas a new customer only holds a 10-20% chance. Converting more of your core customers can lower the cost of acquisition, and create better brand affinity. Post-purchase communication helps continue the conversation between your brand and your customer, encourages them to maintain affinity with your brand, and buy products that ultimately boost your sales.

What is Post-Purchase Communication?

Any communication sent to a customer immediately after purchasing qualifies as post-purchase communication. That communication can be through emails, social media interaction, offer messages, or customer support—but any channel that engages your customers directly counts.

Building loyalty takes time and ongoing communication; post-purchase communication can catalyze that loyalty. In fact, 80% of customers say they gained loyalty for a brand over time thanks to a range of experiences with products and customer service. It’s up to your team to take the first step towards building that loyalty and maintain a long-term relationship.

How to Get the Most Out of Post-Purchase Communication

Due to the digital-first nature of ecommerce businesses, it’s difficult to provide the deeper connection to customers that physical stores create. Don’t stress; here are a few tips from email communication to social media and customer service that’ll help you promote community with customers post-purchase.

Use User-Generated Content (UGC) — Everywhere!

UGC is 35% more memorable than other media, 50% more trusted, and results in 29% higher web conversions than campaigns or websites without it. As if that’s not enough to convince you to market with this type of authentic content, it also allows your existing buyers to see how others are using your product.

Collecting and curating UGC may seem daunting, but Pixlee’s platform automatically pulls in content featuring your brand from the social media channels you select, using hashtags, mentions, and comments. You can then easily ask for permission and set that content live, all from within the platform.

Share UGC you’ve gathered across social media channels not only in post-purchase emails, but also in social media posts and onsite product pages or galleries, because it’s likely your previous customers will frequent those avenues as well.

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Connect With Users On Social Media

Practicing social listening means tracking whenever your brand’s handle, unique hashtag, related tags, or related topics and accounts are mentioned on the social media platforms of choice. Using a hashtag analytics tool can help you monitor mentions of your brand online that you can swiftly reply to with enthusiasm.

‍74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions. Resharing, liking, and commenting on posts from fans engaging with your product will boost your brand awareness and build a loyal community of customers on social media. Fans will feel heard and welcomed when you celebrate their content.

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Post-Purchase Review Collection

Post-purchase surveys are a great way to know your customer’s thoughts about your brand, especially if they are new customers. It also makes them feel that you care about their experience. post-purchase surveys can be sent to the customer directly after purchase via email, but asking for feedback on the order confirmation page, such as asking why the customer bought that product, also works well.

The timing for asking for feedback depends upon the product and the feedback you’re looking for. You cannot ask for reviews on their experience with your product too early as they need time to utilize the product, or so late that the purchase will no longer be in their mind. However, if you’re interested in what kinds of shoppers you attract, you may be able to ask about their motivations just after purchase.

Ultimately, the responses you receive to your post-purchase surveys can be used in a ratings and review section on your product page, incorporated into your product description, or even made into a visual display alongside customer UGC. When it comes to negative reviews, brands with 100% positive reviews can look fake or untrustworthy. Customers want to see some negative reviews and how the brand’s customer service team handles them. This trust created by negative reviews actually improves conversion rates by 67%.

Email Marketing: One of the Best Channels for Upsell

Using email marketing as a part of your post-purchase marketing strategy is probably the best thing you can do, and you don’t even need to rely on discounts or wait for new products in order to sell with email marketing As per research, for every $1 you spend on email, you can expect an average return of $42 (DMA, 2019).

Let’s see how you can include email marketing in your post-purchase communications to drive upsells and brand awareness.

Newsletters

You can create daily, weekly or monthly newsletters to keep your customers updated about your niche. Make sure to keep a community focus to engage your customers and strengthen relationships rather than simply “shouting at” readers about your brand.

Newsletters are not always essential to advertise your business. They can be used just to keep your customers engaged with your brand so in case they want a new product, they would remember about your brand. Simply, you might have something that your customers are looking for. For example, if you have customers interested in sports and you sell sports-related products, you can send them newsletters that cover a broad range of sports topics and share what other individuals in the community are posting online related to your brand

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Offer Emails

Offer emails or promotional emails are the simplest but the most effective way to promote your product or service.

Why are offer emails important?

1. Emails have a very high open-rate. Hence, these can be used to promote further products and increase revenue.
2. According to research, around 50% of customers like to receive promotional emails from their preferred brands on a weekly basis. Even famous entrepreneurs have claimed that their sales have multiplied when they started mailing post-purchase promotional emails to their customers.

Thus, post-purchase offer emails can be a great way to communicate with your customers and promote products that they might be interested in by analyzing their first purchase.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty programs are one of the most effective post-purchase communication techniques that can help you retain your new customers. Using this tactic, you can make your new customers the most loyal customers.

Encourage new customers to engage with your brand on social media or on-site, and offer rewards and incentives for repeat buyers. Make sure to also encourage your new customers to share photos with your product on social media for the chance to be reshared by your brand’s account or posted on your company website. This establishes brand loyalty right off the bat.

Going Beyond for Customers

Give Back: Your customers are the very heart of your business. Your success will almost always depend on how your customers feel about you and your brand. Provide them with gifts after a purchase, discount coupons, surprise sales, and more. These special incentives will provide your customers more comfort, ultimately making them happy to make future purchases from your business.

‍Add Value: You can help your customers add value to their recent purchases and reduce their remorse. There are many ways to add value to any product if you add your creative mind to it. For example, if you have a smartphone business, you can list the best games that are popular with uses of a specific model and send them to the customers who have recently bought that smartphone; if you have a grocery store, you can mail your customers the best recipes to make with your products, or share dishes other fans are making with your ingredients.

You can use your creativity to add more value to your products and keep your customers engaged.

‍Personalize: Personalization makes your customer feel that you care about them from every aspect. You can mark the first day when your customer signed up on your website and offer an additional discount on the anniversary day. Or, you can even mark up their birthdays and contact them through any customer care tool on their special days with some free coupons and special offers.

If you reach your customers with quality messages post-purchase, it is very likely that they will come back to you again whenever they need something else. Maintaining customer relationships with post-purchase communication tactics should be among your top priorities when it comes to increasing purchase values and getting more out of your new or existing customers.

‍Dennis Vu is the CEO and Co-founder of Ringblaze, a virtual business phone system company that helps teams to better serve their customers, anywhere.