Are You Prepared to Reap the Benefits of a Smart Post Purchase Marketing Strategy?
With the holidays quickly approaching, now is the time to audit your post purchase customer experience and make sure it’s the best it can be for that increase in holiday orders you’ll soon be receiving.
The statistics always speak for themselves when it comes to acquisition vs. retention:
- It can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one
- Increasing retention rates by just 5% could help increase profits by anything from 25% to 95%
Let’s look at a post purchase email experience that has some great things going for it, but still has some areas for opportunity.
Here’s an outline of the overall experience:
- Signed up for email via pop up touting 15% off coupon (Day 1)
- 15% off welcome email (Day 1)
- Order confirmation email (Day 1)
- Thank you for purchase email (Day 1)
- Received 15% off reminder welcome email (Day 2)
- Shipping confirmation email (Day 3)
High five to Luca + Danni for implementing an email sign up pop up on their website. Extra points too since it was mobile friendly. Pop ups are a great way to capture email permission and those that tout an offer typically see a much higher form conversion rate that those without an offer. In fact, the average conversion rate for popups that include an incentive is 4.24%, almost three times higher than the ones that don’t include an offer.
Immediately after signing up, a welcome email was triggered providing the 15% off offer that was promoted on the pop up. I love the subject line and emoji—they made it stand out in my overcrowded inbox.
You can see here that preheader text is being used as it’s visible with the subject line in the inbox. I think there may be a slight glitch that is also pulling in the copyright text that resides in the footer of the welcome email. This doesn’t happen on all of the post purchase emails. Check out this post by Litmus to discover how to ensure no additional copy shows up in the inbox after the subject line and preheader. The preheader text appears to be hidden in the email message itself. We’ll save that discussion for another blog post as there are pros and cons associated with that.
The content of this welcome message is spot on. It’s friendly and inviting, yet minimal and fluid. The overall design of the message is simple and creates a visual hierarchy that is easily scannable with clear calls-to-action. Well done Luca + Danni.
There was no need to click through the email as the welcome discount was automatically applied in my shopping cart. That creates for a nice online shopping experience, but could it be impacting the click rate of this welcome message? Shouldn’t marketers start “training” subscribers to take action on their email messages from the very beginning? It could be worth testing to make sure that overall conversion rate and use of this discount code are not impacted when not automatically applied.
Let’s move on to the next message in this purchase experience: the order confirmation email. Sometimes marketers don’t consider true transactional messages to be a part of the post purchase series, but we need to keep in mind that it’s the whole email experience that the new subscribers (and now first-time customers) are seeing. This is another email that is triggered instantly.
You can tell this message is using a different template, which is acceptable and common as it may be sent via a different platform/ESP. It’s responsive in nature and includes all the necessary order confirmation components (including a picture of the image purchased). I really like the fact that they chose to include promotional content in this message too. I love the treatment of the special limited time offer (10% off next order) with a code that can easily be copied and pasted. Emails containing coupons see a 48% increase in revenue per email. Making things as easy as possible for the customer to use the coupon will help you see great conversions from your coupons. A bottom navigation is also included which allows for some navigation back to the site. Kudos to you Luca + Danni.
While I give Luca + Danni props for including the limited time offer in the order confirmation, I really feel like the transactional content in this message is not prominent. Marketers should follow the 80/20 rule which is that from a best practice standpoint within transactional messages, 80 percent of the message content must be transactional in nature and the remaining 20 percent can be promotional. Be sure to keep the transactional piece front and center. I’d also consider updating this template so that from a branding perspective it has the same look & feel as the marketing template and the website. It also appears that preheader text is completely absent from the order confirmation message and the social media call outs that are in a darker gray color are completely lost on the black background in the footer. A few tweaks and this message could be stellar.
Exactly one hour after receiving the order confirmation email, a Thank You email arrived. Like the Welcome email this post purchase thank you email had a simple, direct subject line with an emoji that captured the eye.
Keep in mind that the order confirmation email touted a limited time discount (only 60 minutes) that could be used and there is no mention of that discount in this thank you email. This is the first interaction with Luca + Danni that does not include some type of discount. I’m on board with that. You don’t want to train customers that every email interaction will include a discount.
Luca + Danni did an awesome job of again creating a beautiful email that really draws the eye down the screen. I love the use of the animation in this message. Animation in email can increase click-through rates by 42% and conversion rates by 103% and have a positive effect on revenue.
I’d be interested to understand the overall performance of this email. Would it have a better impact sent a couple days after purchase vs. 1 hour after purchase? That would give Luca + Danni time to include helpful information on the products that were purchased. For example: How do I care for my new jewelry? Any special cleaning instructions? Any other products that would be specifically recommended for me based on what I personally purchased? The main content in this message is repetitive in comparison to the content in the order confirmation that landed in the inbox 1 hour earlier.
So let’s recap…at this point in the overall post purchase experience I have received a welcome email with a 15% off discount, an order confirmation with a 10% off discount, and a thank you email with no discount—all within about 1 hour of my initial interaction with Luca + Danni. Each of these emails are relevant, so I’m not too concerned at this point with the frequency. As discussed earlier in this post, I think there is an opportunity to push the thank you email back slightly and provide some more relevant, compelling content for a first-time buyer to engage with.
Next comes what I believe to big the biggest area for improvement in this post purchase experience. One day after making a purchase and using the welcome offer that was provided and automatically applied in the shopping cart, I received a reminder email to use my 15% off welcome discount. Luca + Danni should make sure that those taking advantage of the 15% off welcome offer get suppressed from the second email in their welcome series. However, there is some great content in this message (customer testimonial, recommended favorites, etc.), but that content probably isn’t even viewed when a subscriber receives a message where the main content that takes up the whole screen isn’t relevant to them anymore. They could easily replace the call out to get 15% off using dynamic content tools and swap out the hero module with more relevant, meaningful content.
And last, but certainly not least, is the email that everyone enjoys receiving…the shipping confirmation email. Just like the order confirmation message there is room to upgrade this template, rearrange the content to display the transactional content more prominently and update the footer to call out the social media spaces. Luca + Danni may also want to consider top navigation in their transactional messages. Links for things like Customer Service, Return Policy, and Satisfaction Guarantee are popular areas that a new customer may need to navigate.
Overall this post purchase experience was great! There is some room for improvement and that’s what it’s all about. As marketers it’s our job to continue to test, analyze and optimize the email experiences that our subscribers have with our brand.
Have you audited your post purchase email experience lately? Now is the perfect time to make sure it’s all buttoned up before those holiday sales begin.
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