Keep customers engaged for better sales
Converting a customer is always a cause for celebration. But if you stop engaging customers when you send off the purchase, you’re missing a trick.
There are a number of different ways that emails can be leveraged to encourage repeat visits, garner those second and third sales and even recover from shopping cart abandonment.
Creating loyal, repeat customers is essential for the longevity of your business. One of the main things that keep shoppers coming back to a site is good customer service. Sending re-marketing emails should always look like fantastic customer service rather than aggressive marketing.
The ideas below are good ways to re-engage your users, but don’t go overboard. Too many emails will turn you into menace.
Here’s a number of different email strategies that will hopefully boost your sales and create those all important loyal customers.
1. Purchase confirmation email
This is a very basic place to start but it’s good to get it right. Once you’ve made an initial sale, chances are you’re sending out a confirmation email. This doesn’t have to be a boring notice of purchase – it can act as a secondary advert for your brand.
Make sure your logo and branding is visible with links back to your site. Give your customers all of the support numbers they might, let them know you are accessible and ready to help. You could even list related products to the purchased item.
2. Shopping cart abandonment
As we all know, shopping cart abandonment is a regular part of online shopping habits. Customers don’t necessarily abandon because they have decided they don’t want to purchase.
If you have the details on file of those who abandon before a sale, follow up with a reminder. Display the items well, remind them why they wanted them in the first place and give plenty of options to follow links through to your site so they can pick up where they left off.
3. Discounts or offers
Once someone has made a purchase with you and received their products or services, they will trust you and be more receptive to offers. Use the information you have about them to tailor the offers specifically to them- it will help to build up a stronger relationship with your brand.
4. Wishlist
Depending on what your product or service is, it can be a good idea to build a “wishlist” function into your site. This way if people are browsing but unsure of what they want to buy they can create a list of things they were attracted by.
This can then be utilised to create tailored email campaigns. You can send out an email letting your customer know that something on their wish list is on sale – or that it is about to run out of stock. This is a strong call to action as it creates a sense of urgency.
5. Back in stock
Alerting people that something is back in stock can attract sales. You can either contact people that tried to buy something but found it was out of stock. This is highly personalised as you know they were interested in buying initially.
You could also send out a list of items that had run out but were back in to all of your customers – making sure you tailor it where possible (women’s jewellery items to female customers only). This is a chance to place your most popular items in front of potential new buyers.
6. Need a replacement?
There will always be goods and services that you know have a certain shelf life. By carefully analysing who buys what and when, you can start to anticipate when someone might need to buy something again.
For example if someone buys 50ml of moisturiser, you can work out roughly how long this will last and send them a well-timed email which predicts they will need to buy again. The same works for timely calendar events – a florist sending an email around Valentine’s Day etc.
7. Thank you
Sometimes it’s a nice idea just to send a thank you email. A couple of weeks after a sale, follow it up with a personalised message of gratitude. It’s simple, it puts your brand in-front of someone again and it gives your brand more of a personality.
If you want to you can put offers in addition to the thanks – “as a mark of our appreciation please accept free shipping with your next purchase” etc. It will give them a friendly nudge to buy from you again.
Great post, Dan. A customer’s overall customer experience and the extent to which the customer becomes and remains loyal is often defined by all of the individual touchpoints that map the customer’s interactions with the company and its products along the way. Companies often miss opportunities to proactively engage the customer in ways that strengthen and extend loyalty and increase sales. Your suggestions present some good examples of how companies can capture these opportunities.