Post-purchase emails are an essential part of customer retention marketing. They are follow up email campaigns after the first order and the aim is to engage existing customers more, make them loyal and drive repeat sales.

Most of the best customer retention strategies rely on such emails.

This is a very different approach than simply sending mass emails with every new promotion you come up with.

Post-purchase emails need to be tailored and to give value to the customer in order to build a mutually beneficial relationship.

If they’re just promotional and pushy, people will stop opening them and you will lose them as repeat customers.

Examples of post purchase email campaigns

Ecommerce has grown so much and there are all kinds of new models, new products and new ways of shopping. Sometimes our clients need help navigating all innovation. How does a curated monthly subscription works? Can you order items outside of it? How do you sign up for a meal plan to go with the hi-tech lunch box? And many more questions people might have for your products and services need answers from the beginning.

Onboarding emails can fill in those gaps so people understand how to buy from you. This will make the customer journey easy and pleasant, bringing you conversions and increased customer retention.

In ecommerce, email marketing is the easiest and cheapest way to continuously engage your customers and drive repeat sales. To stand out in their inbox, though, your emails need to be timely and relevant. How to achieve that? Send emails in response to customer’s action, not just because. Use customer behavior as email triggers.

Triggered emails are always just in time and meaningful – the offers are customized and the customer understands why they get this email now. Depending on your ecommerce CRM and email marketing tool, you should be able to use all kinds of event-based and metric email triggers:

• A customer places/ cancels/ gets refunded for an order
• A customer uses a coupon/ reads a blog article/ abandons cart/ browses without buying
• A customer hits a milestone in order value/ number
• And more customer actions.

Here are some of the most useful ecommerce email triggers to use, the behavior based segmentation to do and the triggered email campaigns to set up with them.

Customer retention is becoming more and more important. World events put brakes on expansions and marketing budgets. Your ecommerce brand probably is also having a hard time growing when people are watching their wallets more carefully. You’ve heard our mantra before and now it’s more relevant than ever: finding new ways to engage your existing customers and drive repeat orders is key to your ecommerce store’s financial stability.

Personalization is now everywhere and people are used to seeing ads about what they just browsed for.

But the rise of ad blockers and after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, they are less likely to overshare personal information such as locations, work place, education, etc. on social media. We collectively as marketers have overused the tools at our hands and now the public is sick of it, driving costs of acquisition up with their inactivity.

In one recent survey, only 17% of internet users say it is ethical to collect data for personalizing experience and offers. In another, 51% of people said they didn’t want to trade privacy for personalized ads. 

Emails that drive repeat sales are the best emails. Forget about basic email marketing that teaches you to send promotions every week or touch base with customers more often, e.g. every day.

To see a real return on marketing, you need to use email to its full potential – it’s a (nearly) free marketing channel that you own and have complete control over. No pay to play like ads. Emails for customer retention are the best way to drive revenue without extra spending.

Customer lifetime value is the best indicator for a healthy business.

Customer loyalty is usually based on a strong connection with the brand and a positive experience. Emails that drive customer loyalty keep this relationship going through useful, timely and relevant content and offers.