Psychology of the Post-Purchase Experience (+7 Strategies for Small Businesses)

After an all-out effort, both horses and humans might need to take a “cool down” lap or two.

Crossing the finish line is not the end all, be all in a race. Following up with a cool down is critical to maintaining the health of the racer — so they can be successful long term.

What does that have to do with Shopify brand owners?

It provides valuable insight into what should come after a purchase is complete.

Making the sale should not be the final step for modern Shopify businesses. Instead, you need to keep working to foster a post-purchase experience to build loyalty and turn first-time buyers into repeat customers.

In today’s guide, we’ll show you how to run a powerful last lap with a step-by-step playbook to create a best-in-class post-purchase journey that fuels business growth.

Get to know the e-commerce post-purchase customer journey

The post-purchase customer experience is all about what happens after a customer hits that “Buy Now” button on your Shopify storefront.

It’s in all the interactions after they make that conversion — the progress emails, follow-ups, offers, support chats, ongoing marketing messaging, exchanges with other customers, and so on.

This experience can take place in many formats: Email, social media, online forums, over the phone, and even in real life when you consider the physical experience of unboxing your product or engaging with your service for the first time.

The post-purchase part of the customer journey with your brand is just as important as every other step. That’s why fine-tuning it can create positive ripples. Every improvement encourages repeat purchases, boosts customer lifetime value (and revenue), and ultimately leads to business growth.

Shopify owners: Improve the post-purchase experience with these 7 practices

Ready to inspire sales, referrals, and long-lasting loyalty?

This section will guide you through how to activate everything from thoughtful transactional messages to personalized email marketing, community-boosting forums, smart customer support software, and more to create a seamless post-purchase customer experience.

1. Build a thorough three-point transactional email sequence

Who else waits (somewhat anxiously) for that first email after making an online purchase to make sure it went through and the business is on top of things?

Those messages are transactional emails, and they’ve become a critical element of the digital post-purchase customer experience.

(Note: With Shopify, most of these emails are called “Notifications,” and you can access and edit them under Settings in your online store admin panel.)

Crafting not just detailed but personalized and well-thought-out transactional emails keeps customers informed and builds trust, which can lead to loyalty. Here are three areas to focus on to see a powerful impact.

The order confirmation

The sequence should start with the order confirmation email, which reassures your customers that their order was received and processing has begun.

This message is all about providing peace of mind and proving your chops as an organized and detail-oriented brand. Plus, it sets customer expectations to hear from you more in the future.

The shipping update

Next up, send a shipping confirmation email as soon as a customer order ships. You may end up sending a few shipping updates as it travels.

You should always include tracking information so customers can follow their purchase’s journey and an easy way to contact support if they suspect something is up. While you can’t always do something about an error that occurs during transit, there’s still a lot of value in simply being available to reassure customers during this time.

Shopify has purchase tracking features built in, but their app store is also full of add-on tools you can install to power up how you handle shipping, tracking, and related messages.

The follow-up

Now for the pièce de résistance. A few days after the order is delivered, send the final follow-up email in this sequence.

Ideally, you’ll want to apply marketing automation to this message to make sure it’s only sent once the package is delivered and the customer has had time to get eyes on it.

Aside from thanking the recipient for their business, you may include questions like:

• How was the order process?
• Are you pleased with the purchase itself?
• Do you have any feedback for us?

This email isn’t just about keeping engagement high, it can also enhance the customer experience and give you valuable insights to improve your brand.

2. Automate these 4 thoughtful product follow-up emails

These follow-up emails are an add-on to the transactional emails described above. They’re not necessary to complete the transaction, but they are purchase-specific and help build the customer relationship.

This sequence should come after the first set of transactional emails, but may run alongside the marketing email campaign we’ll talk about next.

Encourage renewals

Consumable products — think toiletries, office supplies, or that expensive but delicious soda substitute you can’t get enough of — eventually get used up.

If you sell something in this category, emails that encourage a refill, repurchase, or even push your subscription option are a great way to stay in touch with customers. You can even sweeten the deal with limited-time discounts.

There are a few ways to approach this. One, you can identify the average time between purchases and automate timely reminder emails.

If you want to get even more personalized, Shopify has several apps for sending renewal emails at the exact right time, based on actual customer purchases.

• Resend: Programmable reminder emails enable you to re-engage with shoppers
• Replenish: This app enables customers to set up their own reorder reminders
• RGO Subscribe!: Manage your entire subscription program with this tool

This replenishment reminder from Lancome has it all — a reminder to re-up on a previous purchase, a chance to subscribe so the customer never runs out again, and even related products they may want to add to their order.

Personalized recommendations and add-ons

Customers might not be ready for an upsell or cross-sell during the initial checkout process (although there are Shopify apps for that!). But, once they’ve received their order, they might be more open to buying complementary items.

This is a good time to send emails recommending accessories or add-ons to enhance their experience with what they’ve already purchased.

You can create unique email campaign segments that recommend related purchases for each item you sell and trigger those to send each time you add a new customer to your list.

Or, use a tool like Omnisend Email Marketing & SMS, a Shopify app that helps brand owners set up personalized upsell emails.

Loyalty program invitations

While the customer is engaged and feels taken care of, you can invite them into whatever loyalty/reward program you have.

If you don't have one yet, consider that 30% of shoppers say they choose to regularly shop with a business because of its loyalty program!

To save time managing your loyalty program and all the email messaging around it, we recommend tapping into the tools Shopify’s app store has to offer. Popular options include Marsello and LoyaltyLion.

Old Navy nails the loyalty program invite with a simple description, benefits statement, and clear call to action. The thoughtful design and branding are the cherry on top.

Related helpful content

If your product requires assembly and setup or has advanced features, tutorial-style content is a must. And you probably already have all that instructional information lying around somewhere. Turn it into a tool for retention by programming it into a post-purchase email sequence.

Emails like this help customers get the most out of their purchase, reducing the likelihood of returns and boosting their feelings about your brand — and how likely they are to recommend you and buy again.

These emails should be carefully crafted so that they’re not overwhelming. Try to include a few tips around your most frequently asked questions, and then use buttons and links to direct recipients to places where they can dive deeper into all your support documentation — whether that’s your blog, a how-to YouTube channel, a searchable knowledge base, an online community you’ve set up where folks can discuss questions, etc.

3. Invite customers into your email marketing journey

Once you’ve completed all the key post-purchase transactional emails and are sure a customer is happy with their purchase, it’s time to invite them into your regular email marketing communications — with care!

Here’s what a lot of brands get wrong: You shouldn’t simply add customers to the same email marketing list as everyone else. Customers who have already purchased from you need different information and have different interests than folks who have subscribed but not yet converted. So, our suggestion is to create a dedicated segment of your email marketing campaign just for them.

You communicate with a friend differently than you do with a stranger, right?

With a friend, there’s already a foundation of trust, and you’re confident they like you. Your customer is the friend in this scenario. You’ve built a relationship that you should nurture by sharing personalized, valuable content. That may mean sending emails at a slower cadence and limiting them to high-priority messages like big announcements, exclusive deals, and new product releases.

If you aren’t sure exactly what kind of messaging is best, do some research and measure how recipients interact with the emails you send.

Looking for tips on getting your entire email marketing strategy off the ground? We can’t dive into that today, but How to create an email marketing strategy for e-commerce is a great resource. Once you have that locked in, level up even further with this helpful list: Top 10 Email Marketing Shopify Apps.

4. Adopt customer support software built just for Shopify owners

Naturally, customer service is a major puzzle piece in the post-purchase shopping experience.

For the many, many Shopify brand owners who run their own support — this can be hard to hear. It’s a time-consuming job that can feel repetitive and often thankless. But it’s just as important as it is difficult to pull off with a small team.

This is where we once again recommend adding smart tooling into the mix to ensure you can deliver a flawless post-purchase flow.

Meet OpenDesk: A customer support platform designed from the ground up for e-commerce businesses, by e-commerce experts.

We custom-built OpenDesk to empower you to save time and effort on customer support, without sacrificing quality. Here are the features that make that possible:

• Trustworthy, friendly automation: With OpenDesk, you get to upload your own content resources to ensure any AI-enhanced interactions sound just like you. From there, you can automate responses based on product details and customer mood. Then, monitor satisfaction scores of AI-boosted customer support conversations to make sure AI maintains just as high of a level of service quality as your human agents.
• Modern, actionable insights: Aside from all the usual helpful metrics, OpenDesk measures a unique "tickets per order" number to track how much feedback you receive about common issues: shipping delays, product defects, etc. This information is critical for optimizing all facets of your customer experience, plugging profit leaks, and reducing future ticket-worthy problems.
• Smart, organized inbox: OpenDesk centralizes all customer messages from social, email, and beyond and even auto-organizes them by topic. On top of that, you can see important metrics like customer value and order history right inside the messaging screen. This feature empowers agents to wisely prioritize tickets and quickly respond to each with impressive personalization.

If you need to reshape the cumbersome task of customer support into a powerful driver of post-purchase customer retention, get on the waitlist to try out OpenDesk and set yourself apart in the e-commerce space.

5. Make returns painless

Your refund policy can be more than just a boring old set of rules. You can transform it into a powerful tool for boosting post-purchase experiences!

An accessible, easy-to-understand policy outlines how and when customers can return products and receive their money back, building the trust and confidence some shoppers may need to make the decision to buy.

In fact, the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) found that a massive 82% of online shoppers report being influenced by return policies when deciding whether or not to make a purchase.

We recommend making your refund policy easy to find by linking it in your site’s footer, on product description pages, and even in post-purchase transactional emails. This shows you have nothing to hide and begins to build peace of mind from the moment customers start shopping.

6. Foster community to establish lasting customer relationships

Especially as more and more of us shop and work from the comfort of our homes, online communities offer one of the best ways to feel connected to one another.

Brands can tap into this truth by creating digital communities where customers can simply interact or share tips, seek advice, and more.

Communities make businesses feel more invested in customer well-being, furthering loyalty and engagement long after the first purchase has been made.

What does this step actually look like in action? Well, it can be as simple as setting up a group on social media — like Facebook — or a popular forum site — like Reddit — where all shoppers are free to come and participate. Discord and Slack are more focused and invite-focused apps where brands can set up communities. Then, there are purpose-built platforms like Mighty and Zapnito for hosting community members, offering courses, setting up events, and more.

For inspiration, check out Shopify’s robust community where users can view announcements and courses, participate in discussions, search for information, ask questions, and more.

Keep in mind: this can’t be a one-and-done tactic. For a community to have value, it’s critical the brand itself remains involved, both to move the conversation forward and to shut down any bad actors looking to stir up trouble.

7. Ask for — and act on — customer feedback

Who better to tell you the truth about your post-purchase experience, and how to improve it, than your customers themselves?

Here’s how to tap into exactly what your customers want and expect from the post-purchase flow your brand provides:

• Gather feedback: Reach out to customers directly by sending surveys and polls via email, engaging them on social media, or organizing focus groups. These interactions will reveal what they’ve loved about their post-purchase journey with your brand — and what they haven’t.
• Combine feedback + data: Pair the insights you gather from customers with analytics from your support and email tools. This gives you the complete story of customers’ post-purchase behaviors — what questions they’re asking, which follow-up emails they’re reading, etc. — so you can make meaningful improvements to the experience.
• Act, and follow up: After enacting a plan to steadily improve your product and experience based on feedback, it’s also important to follow up with your customers on the action you’re taking. This follow-through messaging differentiates your brand and strengthens customer relationships.

Why it matters: Post-purchase customer experience, loyalty, & profit

As we’ve mentioned throughout this article, the post-purchase customer experience is a core element in building brand loyalty.

Of course, loyalty sounds cool and all — but why does it really matter to Shopify business owners?

In a word: profit.

You’ve heard time and time again that it’s more profitable to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Well, it’s been proven yet again with a recent study finding that the majority of consumers (76%) will spend more with a company when they're part of its loyalty program.

Now, for the rub. Building out all those creative post-purchase experiences takes a lot of elbow grease. How can you transform some of these cost centers that eat up profit into loyalty-boosting money-makers?

A key first step is tapping into automation — such as customer support tooling built just for Shopify owners and small teams like yours. Keep reading to learn how to access all that OpenDesk has to offer.

Provide the best post-purchase experience with Shopify + OpenDesk

Clearly, investing in the post-purchase experience with the above tips and tools is a powerful strategy for boosting customer loyalty and driving revenue growth for Shopify brands.

At OpenDesk, we saw an opportunity to make memorable post-purchase experiences accessible to e-commerce brands of all sizes — not just those with massive budgets for dozens of agents and complex tooling.

We created our AI-powered software based on our own team’s experience running Shopify brands and have used it to decrease support operating expenses, cut down on agent headcount, grow customer satisfaction scores, and increase the rate of repeat shoppers. (Get the details at Introducing OpenDesk).

We’d love to see if it can help you do the same. OpenDesk is currently building a waitlist and will roll out onboarding soon. Sign up to be among the first who get to use OpenDesk’s sleek, smart, and affordable platform to build game-changing customer service experiences.