Looking to increase your Shopify sales? Here are 4 post-purchase email automation that can help:
If you have been following along with my last few blog posts you will see they are heavily focused on email marketing. This is because I feel email marketing is an area where many store owners fall short in their marketing efforts just simply because they don’t realize how much more they could be doing with email marketing. One of the most common mistakes I see is stores and brands having no email automation implemented in their email strategy or very little automation. If you have followed my last two blog posts you hopefully will have at least a great welcome series and abandoned cart series set up (if you don’t go read my past two blogs) but email automation doesn’t have to stop there. We spend so much time nurturing a lead to make the sale so why stop interacting with them once they have made a purchase? There are many automated emails flow you can send customers through after they have made a purchase to help increase your store’s sales and I’ve gone ahead and explained 4 types of them below. What you choose to do after someone makes a purchase will have a big impact on the overall success of your email strategy and your sales.
Automated Flow #1 — The Brand Reinforcement Strategy
The goal of this flow is to reinforce the buyer’s decision and make sure you let them know they made the right decision going with your brand. You can do this by building excitement for the arrival of their order and making the customer love the product you sold them before it even arrives. What you will want to do is design a flow with 2–4 emails that are delivered shortly after the purchase (the first email going out 1–3 hours after the purchase). Spread the rest of the emails out between the amount of time it usually takes for a customer to receive an order, if it typically takes 7–10 business days spread them out over the first couple of days. You will have to be careful that you aren’t still sending people emails about the anticipation of receiving a product after they may have already gotten it.
Basically, the emails in this series should be structured around thanking customers, educating them on your brand and the product, and building excitement about receiving the product. Some ideas you can implement for emails are sending an automated personal thank you a message from the business owner, reminding the customer about your brand and your brand’s story, showing customers reviews from other people who have purchased the product, and educating and teaching your customer on the product they just purchased by sending them to a blog post. By being able to set up this automated flow with these types of emails you will be building brand trust and relationships with your customers. Additionally, you will also see more sales coming in from these emails as you are adding more touch points with your clients.
Automation #2 — Product Up-sell
The goal of this flow is pretty simple, like the subheading suggests you are trying to instantly up-sell another product. What you want to do is send the customer an irresistible offer right after they purchase to increase customer lifetime value. Your first email in this flow should be sent out 1–2 hours after someone orders and the strategy behind it is to give the customer a limited-time offer that is only for first-time customers and state the discount is valid for the next “X” amount hours ( to push urgency I suggest anywhere from 24–48hrs). Now you can set this up to automatically send to everyone after their first purchase or you can trigger it to be product specific. An example of this strategy in action is for a client of mine who sells CPAP machines we have an automated email series set up so if a customer purchases a CPAP machine without any additional accessories or supplies we send them an email after the purchase giving them a discount code to save 25% off accessories for their CPAP machine for the next 24 hrs only. You want to make the offer as irresistible as possible and also make it relevant or complementary to the purchase that was already made. If done correctly you will notice a high percentage of open rates and CTR, for this series 1–2 emails will be enough and the first email should be sent 1–2 hours after the purchase.
Automation 3 — Gathering UGC (User Generated Content)
With so many online stores today it’s very important to be able to gain the trust of potential buyers who land on your store and you can gain their trust by social proofing your store. Social proofing your store can be very crucial to your success as social proof is a big reason why someone may purchase from you. A super simple and effective way to gain user-generated content for your store (ie reviews, video reviews, tags on social media, pictures of customers using your product) while also making some sales is by setting up an automated email series focused on giving incentives for UGC. 1–2 weeks after a customer has likely received the product they ordered send them an automated email stating they will receive a coupon code for leaving a review on the product they purchased, or ask them to upload a picture of them using the product to Instagram. Not only do you build a ton of powerful social proof content to use in future marketing and on your store to increase conversions but you will also get a lot of repeat customers from the coupon you send out to the people who generated content for you.
Automation 4 — Product Specific Cross Sell
If you have purchased anything online before you have likely come across an email like this before, this email series is your typical “We see you bought ABC so you might be interested in XYZ”. The goal of this strategy is to sell relevant complimentary products to people automatically through an automated email series. Again you want to send these emails to customers after they have likely received their first initial product and have had the chance to use it. You want to strategize these emails to be based on what the customer has just purchased. Think about recommending products that are most often bought together, email them about bundles and collections you can up-sell or create or accessories that will compliment the product they just purchased, and even email reminders to replace the product after a certain amount of time, you can really get creative with these types of cross-sell emails.
I hope this outline of a few post-purchase strategies helps you generate more sales for your store through email marketing. Try and make sure to implement as many of these strategies as you can to maximize your email marketing potential and get the most out of your strategy. Remember is it just as important to keep in touch with a customer who has purchased with your store previously as it is to try to get a new customer to buy for the first time.
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