The cost of retaining an existing customer is five times cheaper than that of acquiring a new one. Because of this, you would expect all e-commerce businesses to put more effort into making their existing customers happy to encourage them to keep returning for more purchases. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for most businesses.
Many e-commerce businesses ignore the post-purchase experience of their existing customers once they complete their purchases and put more effort and focus on obtaining new customers.
If you’re guilty of doing the same, it’s not too late to start treating your customers right post-purchase and making them feel valued and appreciated.
This post explores six strategies to improve the post-purchase customer experience of your customers, so read on for techniques you can start implementing today.
1. Personalize Your Feedback Requests
One of the ways you can improve your customers’ post-purchase experience is by sending them personalized emails to ask for critical feedback. Many businesses assume e-commerce transactions are going smoothly, but assumptions are dangerous territory for business owners, especially with competitors looking for every edge possible.
This should be done at least 30 days after purchase to give customers enough time to use the product before giving feedback.
Instead of sending a generic email like, “Dear customer, are you happy with your purchase?”, you should make the email more personalized by addressing each person by their name and mentioning the specific product or products they bought in your email.
This will show customers that you’re paying attention to what they’re buying and care about them and their opinions.
2. Create an Online Community for Customers
You can also enhance your customers’ post-purchase experience by creating an online community for them. When done properly, an online community can benefit your e-commerce business in many ways, including:
- Helping you to foster a genuine and lasting relationship with customers.
- Increasing customer engagement
- Boosting your brand credibility and awareness
- Increasing your customer retention rate
- Driving sales
- Helping you to gain valuable insights for improving your products and services.
Social media platforms are amongst the best places to create an online community for your customers. Do your research to know where your customers spend most of their time and create an online community.
For instance, if your customers spend more time on Facebook, you can create a Facebook group to enable them to interact with your brand and themselves 24/7. It’s a great way to make them feel connected to your brand post-purchase.
3. Provide Customers with a Product Care Guide & How-to Content
Once customers have completed their purchases, there’s a reasonable degree to which you should also ensure that they can use whatever they bought from your store efficiently. This is where product care guides, product demos, FAQs, user guides, tips, and how-to content come in handy.
Investing in the creation of this type of content and including them on your website or in the customers’ thank you emails and feedback requests will go a long way in solving any problems they may have after purchase and increasing their satisfaction rate.
This additional content can be multi-purpose and valuable in retaining and obtaining new customers seeking information on the products and services you sell. Think demand generation.
4. Provide Customers with Personalized Product Recommendations
Recommending products to customers is also a great way to continue interacting with them and enhancing their post-purchase experience. However, don’t just recommend the most popular items in your store.
It’s advisable that you use the information you’ve learned about each customer throughout their buying journey, such as the products they’ve purchased in the past, the products on their wish list, the products they search for regularly, etc., to guide you on which related products to recommend to them.
Getting product recommendations regularly will encourage them to check out those products and buy whatever they need, which means more sales and profits for your business. Here, you can connect the custom content you’ve created and help drive customers back to your website.
5. Create a Loyalty Program for Your Customers
Loyalty programs effectively build authentic customer relationships, increase loyalty and retention, and improve post-purchase customer experience.
Loyalty programs come in different forms, including tiered, point, paid, gamified, and partner programs. Whichever form you implement in your e-commerce business is totally up to you.
Remember that the main goal of creating a loyalty program is to appreciate your customers for making a purchase and encourage them to continue buying from you.
Because of this, you should consider making your loyalty program simple and easy to understand, personalized, flexible, and providing relevant rewards to your customers.
6. Streamline Your Return and Refund Process
Lastly, many customers understand that things can sometimes go wrong when shopping for products online.
For instance, they can choose the wrong product size, receive the wrong or damaged product, or the product can arrive too late to be useful.
In such cases, customers want to know beforehand if your store will allow them to return the product for a refund or an exchange; otherwise, they may consider a chargeback.
This is why you should have a clear return policy on your website telling them exactly what will happen if they don’t receive the exact products they ordered. This can also help to prevent chargebacks from occurring in the first place.
Many e-commerce return policies have time limits within which a product must be returned for a refund or an exchange. However, you can make your store’s return policy more appealing by removing any time restrictions.
But, for customers to get a full refund, they must produce an original receipt. Those who don’t have receipts should be given the option to exchange their products or receive store credits for making purchases in the future.
This will greatly improve your customers’ post-purchase experience and give them a reason to continue shopping with you.
Final Thoughts on the Post-Purchase Customer Experience
Overall, the post-purchase stage of the buyer’s journey is crucial for your business’s growth and long-term success. Giving your customers the best post-purchase experience will help to make them feel happy and valued past the point of purchase. The strategies mentioned in this article can help you obtain this when implemented.