Master the Post-Purchase Journey: Make Your Sales Drive More Sales

Your e-commerce sales are finally starting to pick up — congratulations! But remember that this is just one milestone in your customer’s journey. The post-purchase experience is also an incredibly important phase that cannot be overlooked. 

In today’s increasingly competitive market, consumers face countless spending options. If you’ve already put in the effort to move a customer through the marketing funnel once, it’s advantageous to create a post-purchase experience that fosters loyalty, builds a lasting relationship, and ultimately improves your bottom line over the long term. 

For e-commerce businesses, retaining existing customers is 5x cheaper than acquiring new ones. Marketers, read through that last sentence again if you have to. It’s that important.

Below are some key strategies to enhance the post-purchase experience, boost retention and make sure your customers stick with you for the long term. If done correctly, your post-purchase strategy will even create new customers for you, as your existing customers praise your product through word of mouth to friends and family.

Extend Your Product’s Value with Original Content

When a customer completes a purchase, e-commerce companies need to identify ways to deliver value beyond the sale — and ultimately drive future sales. One way is to draft an article on how to get the best use out of your product: what is the product capable of? Do you have any tips and tricks for squeezing new functionality out of it? The article can be posted on your product’s website and can be leveraged as a piece of marketing content. You can even drive traffic to it through native ads. That way, you can use a single piece of content to drive initial awareness and leads, and also to nurture existing customers.

Aside from helping to generate leads, there are even more benefits to this approach. Providing consumers with information about the best ways to use your product allows for a more satisfying experience and will decrease the need for returns or the need to talk to customer support. That helps boost the image of your product and company, and cuts down on your expenses.  

Ask for Feedback

After a customer buys your product, make sure to get their thoughts on how the process went. The reason for doing this is two-fold. First, it shows that you care about your customers and that you seek feedback for improvement. You can collect feedback through a direct email campaign in which respondents are rewarded for completing a survey with future product discounts or other incentives.

The second reason for getting user feedback is for customer reviews. Customer reviews give your product third-party validation, referenceable by future potential buyers in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. Customer reviews are also indexed by search engines, so prospective buyers can easily find them and they can benefit your site’s SEO. A recent study found that a whopping 93% of customers use online reviews to influence their purchase decisions. Thus, positive reviews are essential to lead generation. In the current e-commerce environment, it can be harmful to have few or no reviews, as that doesn’t build confidence for prospective buyers. 

Personalize Your Site’s Browsing Experience

Remember that advertisements are just the first step in the customer journey. When people eventually click on your ad and land on your website, you need to find ways to keep their attention and move them further down the funnel. 

To stay relevant to each buyer, you can provide personalized product recommendations on your website. Your options include widgets on the product page or cart page, emails with product recommendations (if you have already collected customer emails), or suggestions based on what other customers bought. E-commerce platforms often have built-in product suggestion technology, and there are apps and content modules that enable such recommendation features if you cannot do it in-house.

Personalized recommendations offer additional touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Such touchpoints are valuable since you know that these specific people have already displayed interest in a particular type of product. While personalized product recommendations make up only 7% of website visits, they drive 26% of revenue, which could easily make the ROI worthwhile. 

Remember, driving sales is a cause for celebration, but it is far from the end of the customer journey. Providing useful post-purchase marketing materials and offering personalized recommendations for future purchases are proven strategies to create loyal customers who will be more inclined to buy from you again and again, and recommend your product to friends. 

No matter what stage of the marketing funnel you are targeting, you can turn to MediaGo to easily launch digital advertising campaigns across high-quality desktop and mobile properties. MediaGo offers placements on trusted publisher sites like MSN, and our platform empowers e-commerce advertisers to easily scale campaigns.