Follow-up emails provide an opportunity to engage with customers after their purchase. Most eCommerce stores often overlook post purchase engagement – they send an order receipt and don’t follow up furthermore.
Once a customer completes a purchase, a better practice is to send follow-up emails to make your customers remember you, create a liking for your brand and come back for more. So, a follow-up email has a key role in improving customer engagement and retention.
Why should I keep customers thinking about my store after they’ve made a purchase?
Because acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than selling a product to existing ones.
A customer has purchased from your store – capitalize on this moment, send relevant follow up emails, and retain them. Reports say 63% of customers prefer emails that are relevant to them.
Ecommerce follow up emails are more relevant than any other emails as they are sent after recent customer engagements. Also, they complete the shopping experience for customers and will motivate them to return to your store again.
To send follow up emails after purchase, you need an email automation tool like Retainful. It is a popular marketing automation plugin that can automate your emails, help you reach the right customers at the right time, and drive sales on auto-pilot.
Learn more about the need for follow up emails and how to set up follow up emails in WooCommerce using Retainful in this article.
What are Follow up emails?
Follow-up emails are email campaigns sent to customers after they’ve completed a purchase. The objective of sending follow up emails is to keep engaging with the customers and urge them to return for more.
This is a classic example of an eCommerce follow up email after the purchase. Order confirmation, thank you, product recommendation, refer a friend, and review requests are the expected contents of follow-up emails.
Why should you send post purchase Follow up emails?
A customer has completed a purchase – how confident are you that he will return to your store again?
If you don’t keep your engagement going, a customer will likely forget you and migrate to another store. Most eCommerce stores often overlook Follow up emails as they don’t understand these emails are part of the customer experience.
Sending post purchase follow up emails will tempt customers to return to your store again and help you stay at the front of your customer’s minds.
In the intro part, we told you it is 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers. This makes customer retention a primary tactic to increase sales, and follow up emails play a key role in retaining customers.
Here are a few more compelling reasons to send follow up email after purchase,
- Ask customers to review their purchases and increase social proof.
- Cross-sell and upsell products relevant to their purchase and encourage them to return.
- Send referral links and ask them to refer their friends to your store.
- Drive repeated sales and increase revenue.
The best reason is that post purchase Follow-up emails increase brand equity.
Brand equity describes your brand’s trustability and brand value. Post-purchase follow-up emails show how much you value your customer’s presence in your store, resulting in a positive experience and better brand equity.
How many follow up emails should I send?
Don’t make the mistake that most eCommerce store owners do – sending just one follow up email.
To deliver a complete customer experience, you must send at least three emails as part of your eCommerce follow up email series.
Retainful has a pre-built order follow up email workflow with three follow up emails. You can launch a campaign within minutes using Retainful.
What are the emails to include in a post purchase follow up email campaign?
1. Order confirmation and product recommendation.
Sending an Order confirmation is mandatory. However, you can make it interesting by cross-selling and upselling your products, encouraging customers to return.
2. Educate customers on their recent purchase.
The goal is to stay in front of your customer’s minds, and a product guide email will help you do that. Educate customers regarding their recent purchases by sending a product guide email and improving customer experience Better still would be sending an interactive guide created using product tour software.
3. Ask customers to review their recent purchase.
Request your customers to write a review on their recent purchase. Instead of including a redirection link, make it easy for the customers to rate the product and write a review within the email, as Charlie Hustle has done.
All three emails should be sent well-spaced to yield the maximum conversions.
Why must you automate your follow up emails?
Every day, your store will have hundreds of customers purchasing. Manually tracking all the purchases and triggering follow up emails at the right time is impossible.
A simple solution is to automate your eCommerce follow up emails using a marketing automation plugin like Retainful.
Retainful has pre-built workflows and email templates that can help you launch a campaign within minutes. Once your campaign is configured, Retainful will send follow up emails to the right customers at the right time.
Customers love relevant engagement but only when it happens at the right time. This is why you should automate your follow up emails so that you can reach them at a convenient time.
How to set up Follow up emails in WooCommerce?
Now you know why you need to send Follow up email after purchase. Let’s look at the simple process of creating a Follow-up email sequence using Retainful.
Retainful is available in WordPress. Let’s start by installing Retainful and connecting it to your WooCommerce store.
Installation
Step 1 – Go to your WordPress dashboard → Plugins → Add new. Look for Retainful and click ‘Install Now.
Step 2 – Activate the plugin.
Once activated. You can see Retainful in your Installed plugins list.
To set up a follow up email sequence, you must connect your WooCommerce to the Retainful dashboard using API keys.
Connecting your store with Retainful
Step 1 – Sign up for free at Retainful. You’ll get a 14-day free trial.
Step 2 – In the Retainful dashboard, you will be asked to enter your store URL to generate the API Keys.
Once the URL is entered, the API keys will be generated. You can get the API keys from the Retainful dashboard → Settings.
Step 3 – Copy your API keys. Return to your WordPress dashboard → Retainful.
Under the ‘Connections’ tab, enter the respective keys and click ‘Connect’
Your store is now connected. Let’s create your order follow-up email campaign.
Creating an eCommerce follow up an email campaign
Step 1 – Go to Retainful dashboard → Automations.
Step 2 – In the following ‘Create workflow’ page, select ‘Order follow-up emails’ from the list of workflow templates.
Enter a suitable name for your workflow in the popup and click ‘Continue.’
Step 3 – The customer journey builder page will display the pre-built order follow-up email workflow.
By default, there will be three emails in the workflow. You can add more as per your needs.
Now, let’s configure the workflow.
Step 4 – Start with the Trigger.
Trigger – Trigger decides when a customer should enter a workflow or when the workflow should start. As this is a follow up email, the trigger is set to allow any customer who has placed an order.
Suppose you want to set customer trigger rules. Click the trigger block to reveal the trigger options on the right. Click here to learn about Triggers.
Step 5 – Wait block
Wait – The Wait block lets you set a time delay before the customers move forward in the workflow.
There is a wait block for every email.
Step 6 – Select the email block to configure it.
Write a compelling subject line and preview text to increase email open rates.
To customize the email, click ‘Edit Email Content’ to open the email editor.
Retainful has a drag-and-drop email editor with multiple customizable options. You can add images, gifs, logos, and other visual elements to your emails from the email editor.
If unsatisfied with the template, click ‘Change template’ and select a new template from the list. You can personalize your emails using Shortcodes.
To know more about email editors and customization, click here.
Once you’ve customized your email, click ‘Close’ to close the editor and return to the visual builder page.
Step 7 – You’ve configured the first email.
The first email will follow two more wait actions and email blocks.
The configuration process is the same for the remaining emails too. Repeat the same process to customize the emails.
After configuring all three emails, click ‘Start workflow’ to set the campaign live.
There you go.
These are the simple steps to follow in setting up an eCommerce follow up email series. Emails will be sent to customers at specified time intervals after they complete a purchase.
Launch a new campaign within minutes and increase engagement with your customers.
Conclusion
Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing ones, and Follow up emails play a key role in increasing customer retention. Sending follow up emails will keep your customers thinking about your store.
You can ask customers to write a review, upsell products, and increase your brand’s trustability by sending follow up emails. Most store owners fail to capitalize on this – they send an order confirmation email and ghost their customers.
For a post purchase Follow up an email campaign to work the intended way, you need to send a series of emails at specified intervals to bring customers back to your store.
To do that, you need an email automation tool, and this article showed you how to set up an eCommerce follow up email series using Retainful.
Retainful comes with Dynamic coupon codes, which you can add to your emails and encourage customers to drive repeated sales in your store.
By default, the pre-built follow up email workflow has three emails. But you can add unlimited emails to your workflows, and the recommended sequence is to send three emails.
The order confirmation is also a post-purchase email; customers expect it right after placing an order. Don’t wait too long, or the customer might cancel the order if you don’t send an affirmative.
You can send a series of follow up emails to customers. Recommended products, ask for a review, and even send discounts via follow up emails and encourage them to return to your store.
Yes, Retainful has a drag-and-drop email editor with which you can customize your post-purchase emails and increase your conversion rates by sending attractive, professional-looking emails.
