We also move the moon in the customer acquisition process.
Most entrepreneurs focus on attracting traffic with creative and innovative ideas, invest seriously in marketing campaigns, remarketing and visibility, but neglect what happens afterwards.
After the customer has placed the much desired order.
Put yourself in his shoes for a moment; if you bought a product from your online storehow memorable would the post-order experience be for you?
The dividing line between customer expectations and what can differentiate you from other businesses is the key to reducing your marketing spend, but also to getting loyal customers to return, buy and recommend you.
So let’s talk at length about this very important phase of your customer relationship.
I’ll show you some inspiring procedures and ideas to try in your online shop.
Contents Procedures and ideas for what to do post-order
- Reconfirmations & logistics
- Unpacking experience
- Post-order onbording procedure
- Customer feedback: tips & tricks
- Loyalty program in your online shop
- Exclusive events and campaigns
1. Reconfirmations & logistics
Once the customer has finalized the order and eventually made the payment by card, his emotions intensify.
If it’s a first order – a first contact with your store, pre-purchase objections and uncertainty will persist until the moment he opens the parcel.
If, on the other hand, it’s a subsequent order, after she has already had an experience with you, she will relate to this to manage her emotions. For example, personally, when ordering from familiar stores, I sometimes forget about the order until the courier arrives.
But every confirmation message you send immediately after ordering is incredibly important.
In general, it’s a first email confirming the completion of the order, then an email confirming the placement of the order, which also contains the tracking information.
Between these emails there may be other messages, depending on the situation. If the customer chooses to create an account, the platform will automatically send an email to create an account in the shop.
For payment by card, confirmation comes from the payment processor. For unsuccessful payment, another email comes. For newsletter subscription a welcome email comes.
Do you have these emails set up and personalised?
No matter what scenario happens, it’s vital to have things in place to react quickly. For example, if your procedure involves calling each customer to confirm the order by phone, you should specify this in the order confirmation email.
These confirmations and reconfirmations will calm your customers’ nerves and set the right expectations. Transparent and continuous communication throughout the logistics process will keep their attention on you and form that all-important first impression.
Tip!
When you sell with unosoft, the platform provides you with standard messages for post-order transactional emails. These should, however, be adapted or changed in the style and according to your business model.
You have inspiration templates in the Academy module of the platform and I recommend you to use the customisation variables we provide.
Read also: How to manage orders and deliveries in your online shop
2. Unpacking experience
Unpacking experience is another important point of contact between your business and the customer. This is where you have a great opportunity to form a memorable contact that will influence your customer’s emotions and make them order from you again, if only for the sake of that experience.
So it all starts in the warehouse. From the moment you choose how and what to pack and arrange in the parcel.
- Don’t look exclusively at cost when choosing your parcel packaging – Smaller parcels fit easily into courier bags or envelopes, but for larger ones you need efficient boxes.
- Customise packaging with your brand symbols to be easily noticed – you can use tape with your logo, stickers or stamps. You can also print, write or stamp interesting messages inside the box.
- Add “Instagrammable” cushioning materials if you can – your priority is that the products you order arrive in good condition to the customer, but it doesn’t hurt to think about the impression they will make when they open. Of course, keep in mind your type of audience. You can use bubble wrap, polystyrene flakes, wood wool, honeycomb paper, etc.
- Put surprise items in the package – The customer expects to find the products they ordered in the package, but you can make their day better and make a great impression when you surprise them with something extra. For example, you can add merch for your company (shopping bag, or a flagship product from your store), a relevant product from your website or something sweet or hard perishable, like candy or spices.
- Paving the way for your next order – add a personalized thank you message from you in the form of a letter or note to your parcel. Here, next to thank you, you can ask customers to give you feedback or to photograph/film their unboxing experience and post with a specific hashtag. That’s why it’s important to place the thank you letter on top, to be seen as soon as the box or envelope has been opened. You can also offer a voucher code for your next order!
Bridge!
More and more businesses are choosing to film the parcel packing experience and post it along with a thank you publicly on social media channels.
You can do this too, to increase the sense of anticipation in the minds of your customers.
You can also keep certain components secret, such as the thank-you letter (which you can put in a sealed envelope), in which you add an object or a surprise voucher, for example.
Read also: Why your first 100 customers are super important
3. Post-order onboarding procedure
As I said in point 1, in general customers receive 2 emails from online shops immediately after ordering. And the communication stops here or continues only with newsletters from Black Friday to Easter.
You need a procedure, a sequence, whatever you want to call it, of post-order communication, with an onboarding role. That is, to familiarize the customer with your brand and keep their interest in you alive.
Here’s what your post-order onboarding procedure can contain:
- Education emails for ordered products – you can set GoBots to be triggered according to product category. For example, if you sell cosmetics, including perfumes, you can send an email in the first 24 hours (ONLY if you are sure the courier will arrive within that time) about what to do to make their perfume last longer, while assuring them again that it will arrive soon.
- Loyalty program benefit announcement email – if you offer loyalty points, these will be allocated to the customer account only after a certain period, about 2 days. So, after 48 hours, you can send this email announcing the number of points accumulated for this order and what they need to know about them.
- Mail request reviews and testimonials – Proactively accumulate social proof, don’t expect it to come naturally from customers. Send this email after you’ve made your calculations that the product has started to be used, but not too late.
- Exclusive campaign mail with discount code – Every 10 days or so – depending on your product type – you can try a soft sell, encouraged by a discount code. The value doesn’t have to be high, you can even try a 5 or 8%. The important thing is to formulate your message as an exclusive surprise especially for that customer. I remind you to confidently use the personalization variables, which you have in the Email Bot.
- Reminder email for supplies – if you have consumables, it doesn’t hurt to do your own calculations to send your customers notifications some time in advance. You can show them exactly the products they have bought previously, as well as complementary or similar products.
Of course, you can also use SMS in parallel with these emails!
Read also: 12 types of emails you should send to your customers
4. Customer feedback: tips & tricks
According to Qualtrics, over 93% of customers read reviews when ordering online. 96% of them look specifically for negative ones – because they really illustrate the weaknesses of the store or products.
Too high a score is not credible, but if weaker reviews appear, the total has a stronger impact. It also counts to have many and recent reviews; old reviews lose their relevance over time.
Then, according to Findstack, 62% of customers are more likely to buy if they see photos or videos of other customers. And Podium tells us that 58% of customers are willing to pay more to buy from a reputable company.
All these are statistics from the last 2 years. But, after all, it’s enough to look at our own buying behaviour, and that of our group of friends.
Most of us put our hands on our mobile phones and look for reviews before we make a decision to go somewhere, let alone when we buy.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when you want to attract as many reviews as possible and use them wisely:
- Strike while the iron is hot and ask for reviews after ordering – I specified above details. Add links to the exact products you want reviews for, an NPS form if applicable, or link to a mini testimonial form (review for the store experience). You can use the Automated Reviews or Email Bot.
- Make sure you respect the GDRP – clearly and prominently specify your rights and agreements regarding the use of reviews in the Terms and Conditions, as well as when filling out certain forms, if applicable.
- Use InstaApp to bring photo and video testimonials to the site – as you read above, you can encourage the making of these materials at the unboxing, via the thank you letter.
- Organize contests and giveaways based on content about the store or products – be careful, of course, to respect the rules and not to condition the prize necessarily on leaving a positive review.
- Display text/photo testimonials on the order completion page – for the text ones, you just need to tick the platform after uploading them. Photo testimonials can also be uploaded from banners – for example, you can make a collage of photos and text.
- Direct customers to the testimonials page and provide them with a form – Here you display all the testimonials received so far, so people can be inspired by others in formulating their own texts.
- Post your latest reviews on social media – you can create photos with the text of the reviews, in a style of your own, and in the post description invite others to leave their own opinions.
Read also: Learn to generate strong testimonials – Get reviews from your customers
5. Loyalty program in your online shop
Like all post-order actions, the loyalty programme has a few specific roles: to help you attract customers to your site more easily, more cheaply than if they didn’t know you at all, more quickly and more efficiently.
So, in the post-order stage, it’s the perfect time to convince customers to join your loyalty programme.
- Make sure you have a dedicated page where you explain your program in detail – Customers, but also new visitors, need to understand from the start that there are some benefits if they choose you and buy more than once from your shop.
- Make sure you have visual pointers to that page – Trust icons, banners, maybe even a hellobar or call-to-action popup.
- Mention the benefits of your program in the email sent when creating an account in store.
- Mention the benefits of your program in the email sent when you subscribe to the newsletter.
Read also: The main customer loyalty strategies in eCommerce
6. Exclusive events and campaigns
I ended the previous point abruptly because, in fact, we continue here.
One of the benefits you can offer in your loyalty program to make it more persuasive is access to exclusive events and campaigns for loyal customers.
For example, when you launch products or campaigns, you can organize awards only for loyal customerswith email access. Or, if you’re teasing a new launch, you can limit the pre-order right to loyal customers only.
Or, another example, you can offer them a weekly discount code by email only to these customers. It can be applicable unconditionally, or you can specify a certain order value, and so on.
If you’re just starting out, you can personally call clients who have met the conditions to be loyal customers – they may have placed at least 2 orders in the last x months.
You can ask them for feedback and opinions over the phone, offer them advice if they need it (e.g. need extra services for maintenance, updates etc.) and engage them to become your brand ambassadors.
In the sense that, after discussion, you send them emails with special codes for them to promote in their communities, so that they bring you more customers.
Read also: Trigger events and micro marketing events – how to generate them planned
The post-order stage and the actions you decide to take here can make your business extra-profitable and extra-scalable.
You need, however, to think through your own procedures. Inspiration is relatively easy to find, and you can start by testing the ideas you just read.
So I wish you good luck with implementation!
Don’t forget to use unosoft platform features to the maximum. We even help you with dedicated automations for this step, so there is no need for additional integrations or installations.
Passionate about entrepreneurship and eCommerce, I started my online activity in 2000.
Together with my team I have helped over 3,000 companies grow their business on the unosoft platform.
