Leveraging the Post-Purchase Experience to Build Brand Loyalty

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Whether your customers will buy again from your store or recommend your brand to their family and friends depends significantly on how delightful their post-purchase experience was.

Post-purchase experience is increasingly becoming synonymous with brand identity, loyalty, and trust. Ecommerce merchants must utilize the post-purchase experience to build a strong brand image, increase revenue, and eliminate friction.

AfterShip’s Strategic Partnerships Lead, Joe Wyatt, interacted with D2CX and shared some best practices for building a seamless post-purchase strategy based on his 8+years of industry experience.


What You’ll Learn:


Watch the webinar to learn more about :

  • The importance of post-purchase in the shopping journey
  • The best practices to take your post-purchase journey to the next level
  • How to eliminate the points of friction along the post-purchase journey
  • The importance of brand building



Featuring

Joe Wyatt

Joe Wyatt

Strategic Partnerships

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Transcript

Starting the conversation

Next, we have Joe from AfterShip. So Joe, welcome to the stage. Hi, thank you for having me. Of course, of course, thanks for joining us. So Joe, if you want to go ahead and get your screen ready.

Joe’s Introduction by the host

Everyone, Joe currently leads AfterShip's sales team from their satellite office in Austin, Texas bringing us a unique and diverse background to the table with an extensive background in fulfillment and logistics operations at organizations like Dell. Joe’s hobbies outside of work include travel, mountain biking, and anything water-related during Texas’s hot summers. Joe, I admire your mountain biking excursions because I get way too scared just from riding a bike around the city with my wife, so I'm definitely jealous. All right, Joe, well go ahead and take it away, and just as a reminder, everyone we'll also be dropping a link in the chat to receive two months free on AfterShip tracking pro and AfterShip Returns pro plans. So the stage is all yours, Joe.

Joe Wyatt from the AfterShip Team introduced himself

Awesome! Thank you so much, and today has just been so awesome with so many good stories from other partners. Julia (another webinar speaker), you're gonna be hard to beat that last one was really great but thanks again, everyone for having me and staying for today's call. Again my name is Joe Wyatt. I'm on the Sales Team here at AfterShip, leading Strategic Partnerships, and I'm super excited to talk to you guys specifically today about how to leverage the post-purchase experience to build brand loyalty and trust with your customers. Diving right in, we can just talk a little about me, I guess for a second introducing myself, so as you guys heard I'm based in Austin, Texas. I've been with the team here for about two and a half years, and I've onboarded over 200 D2C merchants prior to joining AfterShip. I myself had my own Shopify store (several of them actually) and I was actually a customer of AfterShip, and that's why I am so passionate, and I believe so much in their product and that's how I came to be here. So what we're going to talk about today is who is AfterShip the importance of post-purchase in the shopper journey and then I am also going to cover some of the best practices and then very last we're going to talk again about that freebie that was just mentioned so you guys can actually launch this on your stores and test out AfterShip.

Joe introducing AfterShip

So, we've been in this space since 2012, both of our founders had their own eCommerce stores so we really come with a merchant-focused strategy in mind, and everything that we've built we build for a reason and we know that it's going to deliver the most value to you and your customers. Our goal and our mission are to provide the best post-purchase experience to drive customer loyalty and increase your sales and I am really excited to talk to you guys today about how we're going to do that. Our company has five regional offices. 70 percent of our organization is actually very product-heavy and product-focused and again we're just focused on making the e-commerce experience best for merchants and their consumers. I always like to show this slide just to touch on some of the various companies we work with. So, when we first started out we were a shipment tracking API technology solution which means that we had built an integrator to over 900 couriers in one single connection point and so that's how we've been powering solutions for Amazon, Etsy, and Facebook shopping. As we go down towards the bottom of the sphere, here in the most recent years we've launched a series of pre-built branded solutions that are just plug-and-play, integrated with all of your other partners and solutions. So, I think we have over 30 integrations now including Gorgias, Klaviyo, Nosto, and ShipBob. You name it, pretty much all the partners on this call—Attentive, and Omnisend are integrated with us. You're going to be able to integrate this app really easily with your tech stack and you'll know that the solid foundation is there. We have over 10,000 customers and 700 plus Shopify plus brands.

Joe Wyatt shared his insights on why post-purchase experience is important based on a survey

So, I would love to now dive in and show you why it's so important. We did a study in the latter half of last year towards the holidays and we actually interviewed 600 of our consumers through our mobile app. I'd love to share with you some of the results that we saw. First, we asked them you know when it comes to shopping for normal retail items online what do you find the most frustrating. The first common thing was to ensure the quality is high and then the next three are actually going to be related to post-purchase situations that they might encounter. So there's a risk that my package might be damaged lost or stolen. It's pretty common these days for that to happen with porch piracy increasing so much. So, whenever shoppers are looking they're looking through your track pages, they're very aware and they're very educated on what could potentially happen if one of their packages goes missing. The next thing is delays like, is it going to actually arrive on time and then the other most common reason is going to be the returns process. I know I'm guilty of this you know ordering maybe two different sizes of one item and return it back and I've been caught sometimes in situations where I realized that that was a sale item and they don't actually accept returns on it. I was stuck with it, right so consumers are getting very smart and they're looking through these things, they're researching these things and it's helping them make educated decisions on purchasing from your company. Um, the next thing that we looked at was the likelihood of shopping with a retailer again if they do encounter an issue and the key thing to look at here are the different categories. So, the first one is we ask consumers if they have a shipment with Amazon or eBay or Etsy and they encounter an issue, are they likely to shop again and try them out again and the large majority, to our surprise, said yeah it's not a problem you know we know Amazon, we're prime members, it's not a problem if something happens. The next one is department stores, so this is Walmart, Macy's, Nordstrom, etc. So, you can see that customers are starting a little more hesitant they're like, you know, that experience isn't great the first time, you know I might not make that decision again and then moving on to the very last one, this is the category that we all are in, which is the D2C merchant, the local brand, the Shopify store and this is where there is a large risk if you don't have that ironed out perfect resilient post-purchase experience. You know you could be losing that customer forever, and we'll touch on this in a moment and later in the presentation, but as you guys know we're spending a lot and a lot of money on campaigns’ ads referral programs to get those customers in the door that first time so, we need to also make sure that we're investing in the post-purchase to continue and build that loyalty with them because it's always going to be easier to sell a second time to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer. So, that was just really exciting and great learning that we found from that. The third is going to be other than price, what other post-purchase experience things are a deciding factor when making a purchase. So, we had touched earlier on the biggest concerns. Now we're going to talk about the deciding factors when someone actually does make a purchase. Of course, you know the lowest price can't beat it right, I'm guilty of this myself, you know filtering on Google Shopping, trying to find that product that I want but I will also say, it's kind of a funny story but I had a bike part that broke, so is my chain and my rear cassette, for those of you who aren't mountain bikers you have to have those parts derived right and so in order to get those parts replaced, my local shop didn't have them so I had to go to the internet to try to find which stores I could purchase the two different products from and get them delivered fastest to me so that I could go mountain biking over the weekend. So, I was on REI, I was on all these other sites looking at their promised delivery dates and matching it up to my schedule, and the bike shop scheduled to actually fix it and replace it. So, these are the situations that you know your consumers are encountering and that they're looking and they're making their decisions based on those factors every day. Of course, it might always not be something as serious as a bike chain but you know it could be an outfit that they want or a pair of shoes they want for you over the weekend. Right, the next thing that we're going to talk about here is quality, right so, that's always an important deciding factor but, you can always see that the lowest shipping costs, the returns policies, the packaging the guarantee on delivery are all things that are considered in these purchase decisions every day. So, I hope that um, you know those three different metrics that we gathered from our customers were really helpful for you guys. I'm sure that we're just reaffirming what you already know, what you've already experienced but um, the second part of this presentation will focus more on what you can do about that.

Joe Wyatt shared best practices to optimize the post-purchase experience

So what I'd like to share are some of our best practices and of course, there's a lot more than this but I've blown it down to these three main points that we'll touch on it today so, - point number one—eliminating any points of friction along your post purchase journey, - point number two would be strengthening your brand voice through a consistent shopping experience from a pre-purchase to post-purchase aspect and then the - point number three is going to be leveraging shipment notifications email, SMS Facebook messenger maybe even WhatsApp as a unique opportunity to re-engage with your consumers and build that brand loyalty and that trust that's so important. So diving a little bit deeper into these, I've got some examples on the screen.

Joe Wyatt explained how brands can eliminate the points of friction along the post-purchase journey

number one, let's eliminate the points of friction along the post-purchase journey so we can do these things like out for delivery notifications, deliver notifications exceptions, may be failed pickups but using those different points to make sure your customers know that you care and that you're proactively investing in giving them that seamless experience through these notifications. We also see an 18% decrease in related and delivery-related complaints so, if you're letting them know that it's going to be late or if you're letting them know that you know it was delivered to the wrong address, taking that action and getting ahead of it is going to reduce a lot of the concern and where your customers have and get a quicker resolution rather than getting that email two, three, four weeks out of somewhere, who's just been sitting there waiting patiently for their order. Additionally, we see general inquiries into the where's my order (WISMO) tickets reduced by 40 percent. So, a shipment could be just completely going normal, it's taken you know maybe five days from the order date to the delivery date but the customer is just wondering, they're digging into their inbox, they're having to go back to that shipment confirmation email. It is a lot easier than them digging through their inbox to just send you guys a quick email, as you guys know that quick email takes a lot of your team's resources and it actually costs a lot of money. So, using post-purchase notifications are going to help you guys dial in on it on that as well as you know, to give them that consistent branded experience. The next thing I want to talk about here is using your brand voice through our post-purchase suite so, again just like the email notifications, it's important to have the branding match your site and so, that's going to be easily achievable through either our integrations with Klaviyo, Omnisend or our own email builder and then we're going to take it a step further as well so, instead of just using that traditional and historic method of sending the customer to the couriers' website, instead, we're going to help you guys retain those clicks back to your own site so you can see here Two examples on the screen are kylie's skin now kylie cosmetics and then Gym shark. So instead of sending customers to fedex.com and losing all that traffic, they actually bring them back to a site that we host for them under their domain. So, if you look up track.jimshark.com right now you can see an example of what that looks like and we actually see about 3 clicks back to the site per order. So, if you can imagine, you know those are probably your shipment confirmation email, your out for the delivery email, and then your delivered email so, consumers are actively looking for information and it's a great opportunity to serve up you know marketing or recommendations or you know different brand um, voice things that you guys want to do with your customers. Another cool thing is collecting feedback so, of course, it's 99, 95 or 99 of the time you know the customer's gonna be feeling great, they're gonna be happy with their product but should they have an issue you want to give them an outlet to automatically leave that feedback for your team rather than having to go to your customer success team just to let you know that they're upset their shipment delivered late so, with that, we actually have a rating bar which allows them to leave a one through five reviews and then we give them a pre-selected list of options whether they like the shipment delivery or whether they had an issue with it they can leave some feedback and that actually goes back into our platform where you can access it and address it with them in real time

Joe Wyatt shared his insights on the importance of brand building

The next thing I'm going to talk about, and this is kind of just concludes today's call but the importance of brand-building. As you guys know it's very expensive and difficult to acquire new customers and it's probably the biggest challenge the D2C marketers and business owners alike face so what we intend to do is to help you guys use your current customer list to build strong loyal and repeatable sales. 50% of the customers that you have right now are more likely to try new products and 31% increase in sales so they're willing to spend more they already trust your brand they know that they've had that great delivery experience with you, they can trust it um, so that's where you're going to really be able to get the most revenue out of this Um, the last thing I'll touch on again is the promotion that we're announcing, so if you guys want to scan this you can go ahead and download two months free of AfterShip's Track Pro and our returns pro solution so it's really going to be an all-in-one bundle for everything post-purchase-related and I'm excited to hear your feedback and questions in today's session so again thank you, everyone, for joining and look forward to connecting with you

Question and answer session

Joe that was fantastic one thing is clear the post-purchase customer experience is crucial I had my mind blown I loved your point about using leveraging those notifications post-purchase to re-engage with your customers whether it be through like how-to videos or refer a friend so I loved that point. How about we jump into some questions? Excellent! Awesome!

Q. So, our first question is coming in from Jack Herman. So Jack asks how does this work with international postal shipments from where the carrier is different from the origin? Do our customers get updates from the final mile carrier directly or the origin post? Origin post often doesn't have specific information like pick-up location or provide specific details on exceptions etc so our customers get confused about where slash how to track their shipment. A. Yeah, great question Jack, and one that I've heard a lot. So we do offer destination tracking. So, for example, if you ship a shipment in the US with USPS and it's destined for China and it switches to China Post we will be able to identify and track that to the destination courier likewise in the United States if you're using a courier service like the Smart Post where it's being handled from FedEx to the post office or final delivery, we also bring those in what I would encourage you to do is go to our website underneath the courier section, and there's actually a place where you can drop in any tracking number that you have and test it out and let us know hit me up I'll give you guys my email its [email protected], and if you do have any issues or questions I'd be happy to connect with the right team Q. Wonderful, and this kind of ties into what we were mentioning before, um how you mentioned the post-purchase notifications but a lot of brands typically spend a lot of time and resources really drilling in pre-purchase. So what else can merchants do to improve the post-purchase experience A. Yeah so one thing that we've recently launched is our own AI and machine learning technology to actually predict the estimated delivery date whenever the courier doesn't provide it so what we see is domestically we see about 40 percent of shipments have an EDD and estimated delivery date from the courier but the other 60 percent are missing so it might just say in transit so we basically fill that gap for you. Another thing is that we actually can leverage that pre-checkout on the product page or in the checkout cart using an API that we've recently developed so a lot of exciting things that come in this space and you know we're excited to find more ways to engage customers post-purchase.

Host concluding the conversation

Wonderful Joe, thank you so much, and for all of our folks who have additional questions, where can they reach you. Yeah, so either LinkedIn is a great place, Joe Wyatt, or my email [email protected]. Perfect well thank you so much for your time Joe, and um, you know, telling us all about AfterShip on the D2CX stage, so we will catch you soon. Great! Thank you all for having me.

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Create a world-class post-purchase experience