Post-Purchase Email: Nurture or Die with Greg Zakowicz

Introduction to Post Purchase Personalization

0:00when we talk about post purchase and personalization what I would say is just don't treat all the customers the same they don't need Perfection on these you don't need to have the perfect series to roll it out you need to have a series or a message fine- tune it look at those results and make adjustments as you go on understand there's not a one size fits all if your product has no potential way to send a how-to video Don't Force One Force some content that's going to engage and help them have a better experience and it's going to benefit them and then you've got tools needed for you so your email Prov rer hopefully use omn but if not come on over but use the tools available to split off your automations to create those segments as you need to and to customize and treat people a little bit differently here so ultimately that what's going to matter so I want to talk

Understanding Customer Value and Differentiators

0:43about just about value ads differentiators and social proof give you a quick example but this is something I would try to templatized on the value ads because those are things going to stick into people's heads so when we talk about value ads make a list for your company what are all the things that you are really good at all right how's it looking Nick you're great it looks fantastic from my side man well done awesome my camera is Shifting here well thanks everyone for making the time today I'm gonna I'm going to get going here so hopefully everyone is doing well I'm here to talk

The Importance of Post Purchase Email Series

1:18about one of my favorite topics which I used when I was Consulting companies I used to talk to them all the time and have arguments about are we targeting postp purchase first are we targeting laps customers first which one are we doing so post purchase is always my winner so we going to walk through this today give you some ideas about ways to kind of build up a post-p purchase email series here so I always say with anything especially post purchase it's a small simple things that matter I used to say small and stupid but they're not small and stupid anymore but it's a small simple things that matter so I say that only because this is not an overly complex thing to do although you can make it very complex and I'll kind of walk through some of those kind of Stage B stage C stage stage D type things today but just throwing it out there this is not a one-size fits-all strategy of course with everything else you know your customers best you know your

2:09products and Brands best so figure out some of the some of these tactics and how they will incorporate into your particular brand with your particular customer so I just want to throw that out there ultimately what we get to is is that one question what makes you want to repeat purchase from a brand why do you want to buy again when you purchase from a brand and feel free if you guys want I'll give you some of my but feel free to throw out particular ones for yourselves in the the chat as well but you know for me ultimately it comes down do do I get a good shopping experience and do I get a good purchase experience and that can be a lot of different things it can be quick shipping it can be good customer service me good value for the price product quality if it's a gift right whether it's for my wife or for friends and family am I getting positive feedback from them it's really a million different things that can

2:59cause it a person to say hey I'm going to come back or I'm not going to come back which is maybe more importantly so here's how what I would tell people you can't assume they will come back which is what a lot of companies do they say hey I'm going to spend all this money acquiring a customer Tactics get you in here and once I get your money you're going to love us and it's an overinflated self-perception of your brand and your products but you also can't assume they're not going to become repeat customers right and that's going to be one of the biggest things so what we ultimately look at it's 2025 we're sitting here in March there are a lot of micro macroeconomic factors in play that maybe we weren't dealing with two years ago we have an experience that not only your brand or other provand other brands are going to provide to that same customer and ultimately the these Trends will shape how you want to build the experience and what I mean by that is

3:48you know if we're going back 15 years ago to email marketing and we're providing a post-purchase email experience that has 6040 text image ratio all text and all these things right your Trends are not fitting the consumer expectations here so if we look at some of these high level Trends and we start rocking from there we can incorporate those into our our email messaging and SMS messaging strategy and help build something out so I want to

Key Trends in Email Marketing

4:12spend just a minute talking about some of those key trends that are going to Loop into what we're talking about today first is the economy stupid right we saw I think everyone here knows consumer confidence we looked at the report in February it's down every single company and I'm looking at earning reports just about every single day right they Walmart cost Target even the airlines they all expecting s expecting soft guidance providing soft guidance for the rest of the year discretionary spending is coming down it's hurting Airline stocks I think we just need to be real that yes we have people that are upper income that will continue to purchase we have people middle class that are feeling a lot very squeezed then we have people at the lower end of that which are going to really be struggling here so ultimately what we're seeing here is there are fewer sales to go around but the customers that are shopping with those brands are tending to spend more money we saw this looking at Black

5:04Friday Cyber Monday shopping periods at amien looking at the numbers coming in we had fewer orders overall yet sales were up and those customers that were shopping were spending 55% more per order and we're seeing that with Amazon Walmart's accepting this you know reporting the same things here so my advice is do every single thing possible to capture every last dollar as cheaply as possible as well so we want to maximize those profit and email fortunately for me is one of those ways so we are seeing email continue to increase year-over Year from an open rate standpoint click the conversion rate kind of settled again back to an upper number last year even though click rate was down and what that's telling me this exactly what the numbers are showing you it's telling you that yeah people are looking in email as a product Discovery Place when they find something that interests them they're clicking through and when they click through they like the purchase right so we get fewer click and browse than we do click let me

6:00go ahead and buy here so email is one of those things where we can use it to engage people and we can use it to drive those sales but we've got to find a way to make those emails enticing for them automation is one of those ways and this is where post purchase comes in so you don't have to look at all these charts here last year you can see in the bottom left corner there 25 billion emails sent 37% of all sales email related sales came from automated messages counted for 2% of total sents and that is an incredible number and typically when I when I was Consulting it I always say can you get between 25 to 40% of your email sales coming from automation because then you've got a pretty healthy program at that point ultimately when I look at it and say it doesn't matter the type of automation you are sending every single one including Labs purchase unengaged re-engagement campaigns will perform better than a manually scheduled message

6:52that's because they're timely they're relevant they typically they send the high intent stages of the customer Journey so post purchase fits perfectly in there and then industry verticals I show this only because typically where you you're going to fit in probably one of these here but where you see lower conversion rates maybe abnormally lower conversion rates typically what that's going to tell you is it's a high competition category fashion apparel right there's a different brand all over the place you have more Niche Industries typically performance goes better what I always encourage people to do is look at your industry reports and say okay this industry over here not related to us but it's doing extremely well go sign up for some of those emails and see what they are doing in those emails that maybe you're not doing that helps them engage a little bit more and incorporate those into your own program as well the last Trend I want to look at today I'm not going to spend a lot of time on SMS I'll

7:41mention it one once or twice but I know Melanie is going to be speaking to SMS a little bit later so I want to make sure she is as relevant as possible and as fresh as possible but we see the same thing SMS continues to increase in adoption it is not a generational cohort conversation anymore so my mother who is not a techn adopter she hates online shopping and yet she's signed up for text messages from Brands so everyone is on there and just like email we see that automated messages perform you know outperform scheduled promotional messages and we can incorporate these into our post purchase experience which is ultimately what we want to do so if we look at those Trends and say okay SMS is hot SMS is a permanent thing automated messages work really well we know that if we can get you to buy you'll buy a little bit more and email is being open and clicked on an increasing rate we know we're in good shape now how do we get them to actually

8:35click and engage them and this brings me

Effective Post Purchase Messaging Strategies

8:37to the post-p purchase messag part so if we apply those Trends to our series here's what I want to look at I want to look at postp purchase as a high conversion one and what I show here is yeah it might not be the most converting one but every single order that comes in so that point what is that I've got terized 0 88% conversion rate that every single order is a repeat purchase whether it's a second purchase third purchase fourth purchase whatever that might be and that's the thing we want to keep those people purchasing from us and not from someone else and that's where we really want to focus and understand that yes our automated messages can drive these so how do we do that well ultimately how I look at the post purchase is how do we enhance the customer experience how do we make that purchase experience better than it was before and how do we make it more appealing than other companies thing do that is I look at those messages and say

9:32I'm going to send X amount of messages and the whole goal of these messages is to benefit the customer do not care of course I care but in the grand scheme of things what I'm planning I do not care if they purchase again for me I want to make their experience better and I'm if I do that I'm going to engage a customer I'm going to get opening and interacting my messages and I'm going to constantly reinforce value at the same time here so when we look at building out a series there's a a whole slew of messages this is not an all-inclusive list here these are just things I'm thinking about and going okay I could send a message on this I could send a message on this it's going to be dictated by the number of orders someone has from you the type of business and products you're selling but here's just a sampling of types of messages so when someone says I can't do a post-p purchase series or customers don't want to get stuff I would look at

10:23this and go you have options you're just choosing not to so I want to spend a couple minutes I want to walk through examples of what these messages can actually look like in the wild talk about them and then we'll talk about some segmentation strategies and personalization options afterward so thank you probably the most common one is a simple thank you message typically these are sent maybe a day after someone makes a purchase could be a couple hours after someone makes a purchase doesn't really matter I was always comfortable with one day after whole idea here is to thank them right you can offer an incentive some Brands will say hey thanks for your purchase as our way of saying thanks take 50 % off your next order not necessary but it can certainly convert people a little bit better I would say if you offer a incentive do not send it three hours after they purchase because they're going to contact customer service and say Hey I want that 15% off the order I just

11:12bought right so we have to use little Common Sense here whole goal of this message make them feel valued make them feel important provide some sort of call to action and that can be to an FAQ page to customer service to providing a phone number to other top rated products whatever it might be so this middle example here is one that received well my wife received you see that theme today presentation but my wife received this in the Q4 shopping period she's like oh that's interesting and then she's looking at this she goes oh I kind of like those lamps right so here we go it's just a a visual example of a thank you message that spurred her and going oh you know what I didn't see those before I'm going to check it out again so simple thank you message send it off you'll start engaging your customers and then you can start to build a pond okay how do we make this experience even better I love thank you messages I love

12:03howto messages even more so howto messages help you help the customers get value from the product right so this middle example my wife sent me this last week did not know I was giving this presentation and I said oh that's perfect perfect timing here what I love about these is one it reinforces the value of the product you can drive and build up your social profiles with this get those YouTube watch hours on videos If you host them there but these are ways for customers to one get the most value out of your product but two engage with you this way so I used to work with this company they sold high-end Christmas trees artificial Christmas trees and when I mean high-end I mean high-end very expensive and I was talking to her one day and she's like you know it's like the typical Pinterest project you get you see these beautiful pictures you get the tree you put the tree up and then she said customer service would get flooded with calls with people saying hey this tree looks

12:58nothing like the thing on screen right what they were buying and the customer service person would then give instructions of how to properly flop the tree which is what it's called so they had a good communication system in the house where the customer service would give reports to the marketing team and to other teams about hey what's what are we getting these calls on and marketing team looked at this goes okay well we'll create a post purchase how to properly fluff your tree and what they were able to do with that is I think it was I'm trying to think now it might have been like a 55% reduction in calls of their customer service they were able to increase the accessory sales because of that and they were able to generate more user generated content because people love the the outcome of the product they were sharing on social so it's all about listening to One customer service internal and your customers about what they're missing what they could use to make them use that product a little bit

13:53more and then send them a message to help them do that and with that they're going to think you have great customers service whether or not you but being proactive helps them think that again it can grow your social platforms it can grow That Word of Mouth especially if you're giving something as a gift and it helps them see value in that product which means next time they need to make a purchase whether or not they purchase from you it's going to be in the back of their mind going yep these guys are good so it's engaging content from there along a very similar vein is product care messages and I love these messages just as much as I love how to because again it reinforces the value of the product could send a you could sell a $5 widget and if you tell them how to care for that widget it instills a sense of value in that particular product some products are easier than others but here's a couple examples right baking steel how to clean and care for your

14:42baking steel this is like a pizza stone but a super heavy piece of Steel I have one of these one of my co purchases but the thing's awesome right and I'll swear by it I would not know how to clean the thing naturally or maybe I would clean it with something that would would damage the the product itself these messages what I love about them is they have a natural cross sell opportunity with them so if you're selling lingerie and you sell lingerie bags or lingerie wash or whatever it could be great you could subtly suggest that in not only on the landing page but in the email maybe boots or shoes you sell waterproofing spray whatever it might be but very easy upsells or cross cells associated with these products again and again it's engaging content that people want they can share socially makes them feel valued so love these messages followup mess mes these are great I love them for first time only customers so this is really just a check-in you know a week

15:35or two after you place an order you send the message said hey thanks for your first order with us is everything perfect with your order if not here's how to contact us and I would make that contact very easy you're not going through a queue you're not getting an AI chatbot what we found with clients that have done this before was you get the typical mediocre experience so customer gets something the product's fine experience maybe it was fine maybe it took a little extra time with shipping but whatever issues they were having were not big enough for them to take the time to contact customer service request a refund request help they were just kind of eh and then next time they want to make a purchase you are not the first choice they start looking somewhere else maybe you're in consideration but you are not the go-to at that point these messages have the ability to Spur someone in action being like hey you know what thanks for checking in I actually had this issue with here with

16:28this XY y z and it gives a customer service an opportunity to then correct that problem they're on the spot immediately make them feel valued and we've seen the Recycled stat from I don't know 10 15 20 years ago that a customer who had a problem and had it resolved in a good way became more loyal to that brand than otherwise so there's a really good opportunity to engage your first-time customers and it you again we go back to repeating issues if you start to see repeating issues here it's your opportunity to correct those issues before they start cannibalizing your business pretty well so a lot of different opportunities there but I love these for first-time customers kind of think of like a waiter you're going to check on how the food was and a good waiter will always say is everything perfect today right instills that perfection in people's heads and they have a hard time saying no and then we can sprinkle these in with other types of messages or SMS messages again I'm

17:19not going to spend a lot of time on SMS Melanie is going to hit you for that later but there's these messages all carry over so think about intro or invites to joining a loyalty Rewards program think about obviously layering on your transactional message as well think about how to right if it's a social video so Instagram Tik Tok YouTube whatever it is easy access easy clicking from the phone so these things really pair well together and if you say you don't know what type of message you can send we've got plenty for you so this is how you can make them work and really make customers feel a little bit more in tune with your brand and products and again it's all about making the purchase experience better for the

Segmentation and Personalization Techniques

18:01customer so if we can send those out and you can start tweaking the messages and most companies will end up around two to four messages but again there's going to be challenges here because are you going to send the same series if they do come back to purchase that set a messages again if they are a loyal customer are you going to send that same series of messages every single time the customer comes back the chances are and the answer probably should be no and this is where kind of segmentation comes in and looking at different ways to do this and there's a slew of different ones you can do so first tip I would tell people is suppress recent purchases from your promotional messages so if they just bought within the last seven days maybe give them a little break let the postp purchase series do the work even if you don't have a post-p purchase series I'd probably give them a few day break there anyway so you can create a segment just

18:46for recent purchasers make them a suppression segment on your sends and then look for ways you want to kind of customize this moving forward I think rfm is a very simple way to do it so recency frequency monetary so hey we have a segment for onetime customers we have a segment for two time customers we have a segment for three you know keep going on until you get to the point of deeming them a loyal customer we could do recency we could do monetary so is it a firsttime customer however they spend six times more on their order than the typical aob maybe want send to send them a more customized or more personalized firsttime purchaser series because we know that they are extremely valuable at least from a monetary standpoint and we could just layer that into our automations so different series based on those history different series based on spend different series based on kind of frequency how often they coming back to buy is it more frequent than our typical churn is it less

19:48frequent but they keep coming back right we can kind of customize that as we move forward and a way we can do that with making them feel a little more personal again we're not Reinventing the wheel on the series but here's two examples you know the one on the left here you made your very first purchase so we're just calling it on the message hey welcome to the club all right welcome to us the second one on the right here this is one I got in December this year so when I ordered something second time you know and they specifically call out hey thanks for making your second purchase with us and it's super easy to do we're not Reinventing the wheel we're not Reinventing the message a whole lot we're just slightly tweaking some verbage in here and I want to focus on the second a message here so hey here's one you know hey you didn't just buy once but look at the bottom section here that's highlighted our team is going to

20:37reach out to you after the order is delivered and make sure everything was perfect with your order there's that perfect word word again so for me you know there are a few different companies that sold this product we've ordered from a couple of them usually based on price because it's not a cheap product it's part of our Christmas dinner and this is the one we're like hey you know what we had a good experience last year loved all the little addons and stuff they put in the package and we did it again and then we got this I think what happened to to us it's very important that you follow through a week later whatever the timing is to say hey how was everything this is a really good example of a company recognizing how often we purchase proving that they have exceptional customer service and now next year I'm going to go you know I know that if there's ever an issue they'll take care of me because they're spending the time and the dedication to

21:33make their emails that much better so again you could see a lot of different ways we can go about doing this figure out the one that's right for your business figure out the right one that's right for your customers how they interact in your product and you'll be good to go doesn't only apply to post purchase though so I mentioned that 37% of all sales from an email side came from automated messages there's a couple that make up the majority of those two of those are abandoned card and product abandonment and think about how we have this post-p purchase data our our segments on first purchase second purchase whatever that might be how can we customize these to our other messages so does the loyal customer or the firsttime customer coming back to purchase a second time how do we treat them differently from an abandoned cart message standpoint rather than sending the generic ones that we send to everyone maybe they get shorter timing different incentives only one message we change the channels on them so it's

22:26either email and SMS or maybe we just do SMS only for loyal customers same with product abandonment if they're coming back multiple times and they purchase multiple times do we need to send them a product abandonment message each time do we change the verbiage in there so once we have our post purchase set up now we can apply those same filters to the rest of our Automation and if they're already converting well we can just start keeping this flywheel going of customizing already personalized messages even more so when we talk about post purchase and personalization what I want what I would say is just don't treat all the customers the same they don't need Perfection on these you don't need to have the perfect series to roll it out you need to have a series or a message fine- tune it look at those results and make adjustments as you go on understand there's not a one-size fits all if your product has no potential way to send a how-to video Don't Force One Force some content

23:20that's going to engage and help them have a better experience and it's going to benefit them and then you've got tools needed for you so your email Prov Rider hopefully use omnis but if not come on over but use the tools available to you to split off your automations to create those segments as you need to and then customize and treat people a little bit differently here so ultimately that's what's going to matter now that being said I want to

Optimizing Email Templates for Better Engagement

23:45talk just a minute about email template optimization so I know this is something Jimmy and Chase talk about all the time Chase is really good at at communicating hey this is how to use different verbiage to accelerate things and to make people feel engag engaged I know we're both big fans of social proof so I want to talk about just about value ads differentiators and social proof give you a quick example but this is something I would try to templae as much as possible in all your messages but especially your postp purchase on the value ads because those are things that are going going to stick into people's heads so when we talk about value ads make a list for your company what are all the things that you are really good at so it could be speed and cost of shipping it could be friendly return policies it could be customer service always available no AI chat Bots right you just get through to a person whatever those are promote those in your

24:34messages every place you can but it's it's pre-made content you can put in the post purchase messages so hey what do I put in my thank you message I don't know what to say hey thanks for a recent purchase don't forget we always have free returns if anything goes wrong with your if there's any issues with your order but always feel free to contact our 247 award-winning support we are here for you we want to make sure everything is just perfect for you same thing with social proof this is really good for post-p purchase messages especially on say those how-tos or product recommendation type messages or subtle cross cells in secondary or tertiary content each of your messages again social proof helps build that trust but it also guides Shoppers and that's what's important for you so I get this message I'm a first-time customer that example with the the lanterns my wife did not know they sold those lanterns but she liked the lanterns right so if we have something with like top rated or customer

25:32favorites whatever there's in that secondary content it helps guide people to good products that people loved and these things again we can tempti into our each of our messages and here's just a quick example of one way to do that so you know this is just a recovery section in someone's email you can see the main call the action and they've got the value ads they've got their star ratings they've got their testimonial and then they have their additional value ads so they're reinforcing it at every single place in their messages and here's just another quick example super short message one call to action we're selling a single product but we can still hit all these different things to reinforce this with our customers so when we talk about building out a post purchase series ultimately what we're looking at is again improve the customer experience can we send a series of messages however many messages that is and it could just be one that benefits the customer and if we benefit the customer it's ultimately

26:29going to come around to them making another purchase we're increasing that customer retention we're getting more money customers getting a great experience great products maybe great gifts and that we can just keep that flywheel going as long as possible and again if people are consolidating their purchases now and spending more with the companies they are shopping with we need to try to capture as many dollars and as many customers in sales is possible because if we're spending more getting more aov we're getting more profits autom everything when you can use them use the tools to your advantage and that's the the beauty of it we have it's so easy to do splits and automations now and we can just create a segment or split a yes no to customize these messages even more one channel two channels three channels doesn't really matter so use them all together and constantly promote your value here so hopefully there is at least one thing in there that everyone can take away I know we purposely left a little bit of

27:25time for Q&A here so I'm happy to that or go back and look at some of those

Q&A Session with Greg and Nick

27:30examples here so let me na it brother thanks man so Nick so question for you Nick is I'm going to scroll through some of these questions here but I call you I call you Nick but I know you go by Shaq so I I won't judge you it's it's Habit to call people by first name so Shaq you've got a subscription business any of this ring true to you dude I it's funny because I I a lot of the questions are actually coming for me too because this is a very selfish thing this is why I do events like this so I can pull very smart people talking about the things that I personally am interested in I just happen to have 300 other people watching with me so short answers it it does ring a bell to me it's actually very interesting because I want to ask this to you and I know Brian Stark who's going to talk subscription right after he wants to ask this I I'm coming to this conclusion of I have to have a

28:16post-p purchase message that's unique to those that are not actively going to subscribe but they might be my second time buying for me non-subscription so if you're talking to me as a subscription business owner which where we have we have 15,000 subscribers but a lot of people also want to not subscribe how would you recommend at least the depth of messages to should the message be the same to my subscribers or should my message be different to those that are repeat buying but not subscribing what do you think yeah so this is good so I am I'll give you an example here about ways you can kind of convert me so I am not a just my personal nature there's C there's few things I have subscriptions for outside of like your your typical like communic like TV and stuff like that but from a product standpoint there's very few I am a subscriber for my coffee is one of them so got a coffee comp company that I found like the beans like the service I

29:14was one of those guys that was like I'm not going to subscribe right away I'm going to go ahead and try and I'm going to try him and after three or four times like the experience was good the emails were good they weren't hitting me with too many they you know the product were good they got shifted I'm like you know what makes no sense for me not to subscribe and this is now three years later three and a half years later I'm still getting my monthly coffee delivery right what they did was bottom of their emails right they had a postp purchase hey thanks for your first-time customer secondary content they didn't shove the subscription down my throat but it was very clear that hey these are the benefits you get from a subscription you get your your points you know blah blah blah and I think they just constantly it was the value they reinforced the value every every stage without shoving it down my throat I really think that's important again the value can be price

30:03the value can be customer service the value can be product quality it's kind of up to the consumer how they dictate what value is you know and you could always do dyamic content on just your promotional messages right you've got a footer for your subscription customers if you're sending something else out hey new product or whatever it is and then a dynamic one for nonsubscribers that say hey don't forget you know you get XYZ off with every order blah blah blah so I would look there [Music]