Let me ask you a question.
When your customers are buying your products, are you doing a good job of post purchase marketing flows?
Meaning…
Are you putting strategies in place to encourage your customers to repeat purchases from you?
You may not have put a ton of thought into the messages you send to newly-acquired customers before, but post-purchase communication is extremely important to ensure every new buyer has a positive experience.
Some of the best marketing channels to work with when communicating post purchase is using SMS & Facebook messenger marketing.
Why?
Because they get great open rates!
Working these channels for your post-purchase marketing is an important part of the customer experience because you can continue to provide value after purchases to ensure a positive customer relationship.
Putting a real focus on positive customer relationships will help to enhance the customer journey and elevate your brand with more credibility and authority.
Businesses can use post purchase messaging to continue marketing towards customers in the hopes of bringing them back for another purchase in the future.
And in reality, it’s a really effective way to keep your brand relevant in customers’ minds. According to econsultancy, 80% of consumers said that consistent post-purchase communication from a brand is fundamental to their desire to make another purchase.
Why Should Your Brand Use Messenger and SMS for Post-purchase Marketing?
One of the reasons mentioned is because of the high open rates that these channels receive (at the time of writing this). It’s fair to say that most brands will gravitate toward using email first for all their post-purchase messages and that’s fine. But the truth is Messenger marketing leads to a 70% better open-rate than email marketing.
Then you have good old fashion SMS (short message service) marketing which has come back into fashion in recent years and can see open rates as high as 98% compared to the 20-30% email has.
I still think email marketing is highly important to a brand’s revenue development, but you want to make sure you are doing things correctly. You’ve got to be really good at hitting that inbox and that’s a challenge for many marketers.
Right now, receiving messages from SMS & Facebook messenger is easier to achieve than email. That’s why you get higher open rates from those channels.
It’s important to offer an omnichannel marketing experience, as it’s one of the best ways to leverage post purchase customer engagement.
According to the Mackenziecorp, companies with strong omni-channel customer engagement retain an average of 89% of their customers. That’s a massive increase when compared with companies that offer a weak omni-channel customer engagement experience. These weaker omni-channel experiences only retain an average of 33% of customers.
3 Messages To Implement In Your Post Purchase Marketing
Purchase Confirmation Message
First up and perhaps the most obvious one is the purchase confirmation message. You have to let customers know that you received their order and give them an order number. But are you thanking every individual customer for their purchase? Are you writing something a bit more personal than just “Thanks. Here’s your order number.”? What about giving customers the option to be notified about shipping updates directly through Messenger?
These types of messages lead to a great customer journey and experience with your brand. Conveying a sense of appreciation for your customers, their purchases and offering helpful updates about their order, you’re providing a direct line to important communication. This way they know exactly what to expect from your business.
You can see why it’s important to update your customers. Messenger and SMS are the perfect channels to reach them because they’ll get your notifications within seconds.
Product Recommendation Messages
Next up is the idea of sending messages based on product recommendations from your brand to your customers. I read in a recent article that 73% of customers prefer to make purchases from brands that actually use customer data to make the shopping experience personalised.
When a brand harvests data about previous product recommendations, it’s in a position to showcase other products that may be of interest to the customer.
For example sake, if a customer previously purchased fitness apparel such as a pair of Gym shoes, a good product recommendation would be other parts of a fitness outfit to complete a look and end result. Things like Gym socks, leggings, shorts, training tops, fitness band etc etc.
You get the picture right?
Based on previous customer purchasing behaviour, you’ll have opportunities to up-sell and cross sell to your customer knowing that they have a potentially strong interest in what you have to offer in a post purchase message. For you as a business, the benefits are a potential increase in average order value and customer lifetime value.
Product Reviews From Your Customers
Last on the list is the idea of sending messages to your customers in order to acquire feedback. I always say in any audit I offer, that positive customer feedback is highly important to showcase in areas of your web presence such as product pages, social media stories/posts and even third party websites.
How this works is that once a customer orders something from your brand online, you should send an email asking them about their shopping experience with you. Bare in mind that not every customer will respond, but the ones that do show their interest in your products, will give you an opportunity to acquire social proof in the form of reviews.
And usually, they’ll have great advice to share. This is exactly the type of user generated content you want sprinkled throughout your web presence.
When you ask customers for feedback, they get personal value from this request because it increases their self importance and value as a customer. The result is a deeper connection between you the brand and the customer. This can further result in these customers turning into long term brand advocates of yours, which can even be more beneficial for your brand.
You can follow up with customers through Facebook Messenger, which is a platform that can give you a better chance at receiving high response rates and ultimately acquiring more feedback and reviews. This is because your customers will get the message instantly, and it’s easy for them to respond. It’ll be easy for them to respond through this channel.
