Why it's important to enhance your post-purchase experience
Finding the right apps for your Shopify store can be tough, especially when there are over 8000+ listed in the App Store and counting. To choose the best fit for your store, you need to take apart your store and experience, analyze each element and ask yourself “how could this be better?”. After all, customer experience is one of the most important opportunities to acquire and retain customers.
One area of the customer experience that is absolutely essential is post-purchase. This includes everything that happens as soon as a customer clicks “Checkout” - from transactional emails, to shipping, delivery, unboxing, returns and more. And of course, there are apps that can help you enhance every aspect of the post-purchase experience.
Today, we’re going to talk about the importance of a great post-purchase experience, and how merchants can improve their store with Order Lookup - a real-time tracking app for Shopify.
Why the post-purchase experience is important
By the time a customer decides to place an order, they’ve already seen a good portion of your amazing customer experience. They’ve navigated through a beautiful, functional website, been provided with a great product page experience, read plenty of glowing reviews, and more. In ecommerce, there is a lot of emphasis placed on getting the customer to that point. Acquisition strategies, UX and UI auditing, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and more. Once they click “checkout” it’s easy to think that your job is done - they ordered!
However, what happens after they place that order is perhaps even more important. This is what’s known at the post-purchase phase of the customer experience. And what happens in this phase can impact customer satisfaction and retention.
Acquisition is important, but retention is where many merchants will make their money long-term. It costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, and your chance of successfully selling to a new customer is just 5-20%. On the other hand, returning customers are 50% more likely to try new products, and spend 31% more on average.
How do you retain those customers? Well, 73% say good experience influences their brand loyalty, and 85% say they’d stop shopping with a brand after a poor delivery experience. So, it sounds like a good idea to start there - shipping and delivery in the post-purchase experience.
Shipping, Delivery, and Communication
Once they place that order, customers want to be informed about what’s happening with it. They don’t want a simple transactional email confirming their order, they want up to date information until the moment the package arrives. There are a number of reasons why this is the case. Some are obvious, like ordering something as a gift and wanting to ensure it arrives on time. Or perhaps they’re going on vacation, and won’t be around to receive the package if it’s late. Perhaps there’s a courier delay, and they expected their order within 3 days but they’re on day 5 with little information. In any case, lack of communication causes frustration. If a package is delayed and the customer isn’t informed, close to 70% of customers say they’d be less likely to shop with a retailer again.
It’s easy for merchants to fall at the order communication hurdle. Automated transactional emails are typically seen to take care of things - they give the customer confirmation of the order and let them know when it has been dispatched. However, they require more communication throughout the process - 82% say it’s important for brands to keep them informed during delivery. Without better tools, they’re left in the hands of whichever couriers you use. You have no control over whether or not a courier’s portal is easy to use, but it will still form part of your customer experience.
Enhancing your post-purchase experience with Order Lookup
Many issues that customers face in their post-purchase experience have simple solutions. When it comes to order tracking and communication, you can enhance their experience with apps like Order Lookup. The app provides customers with a real-time, live tracking portal that contains all the details of their order alongside any notes the merchant adds for extra information.
In the back end, merchants are provided with a simple to use dashboard that will report on orders being tracked, as well as making it easy to add tracking information to populate the customer facing portal. Merchants can customize the look and language of their portal, to create a seamless branded experience consistent with the rest of your store.
Rather than using third party tracking sites, customers stay within your brand’s reach using a live tracking tool that gives them clarity on where their order is. On third party sites, they simply have the package details such as tracking number, weight, and destination. With Order Lookup, customers can see a summary of their order, so they know that the items they ordered are all arriving at once. Alternatively if an item has to be shipped separately, the merchant can add this into the tracking notes so the customer isn’t faced with a nasty surprise when they open their package.
With Order Lookup, merchants take control of their entire experience, and customers take control of their order communication.
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With every brand competing on experience these days, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd and retain customers. Tools such as Order Lookup allow you to fine tune very specific yet important areas of your store and deliver the high-quality experience your customers expect and deserve.