Post purchase customer behaviour 🔍 Evolving Strategies

EVOLVING STRATEGIES

This week’s opportunity to evolve your strategy

Digital sales strategy of post purchase customer behaviour

Quick read:

• 82% of customers feel buyer's remorse after the initial feeling of happiness wears off after their purchase.

• Understand your customers' feelings and create a plan to action these at strategic times during the customer's journey to combat buyer's remorse.

• Your digital sales strategy can improve with a focus on improving the post purchase experience, identifying the emotion's of buyer's remorse and gaining feedback.

The digital sales strategy of post purchase customer behaviour

The post purchase experience for a customer is just as important as the buying of the product itself. Your business should focus on how the customer feels after they buy. If there's feelings of regret or additional support required, you should address it to continue providing a great customer experience. If a customer does have buyer's remorse and it's not addressed, they're less likely to buy from you again. 

For example, your a customer who recently bought a life sized toy car for your daughter's birthday. You buy it and the sales rep was helpful in store. He directed you to the website in order to have a step by step guide on how to easily put together the car. You go online to download the instructions and see how complicated everything is. So you decide to call into the store to help you because you only have a day to put this together before the birthday party. You call in several times and no answer. Now what do you do? The birthday is in a day away, and tomorrow morning you're running around finishing up last minute errands before the party. 

Are you satisfied with this experience? Were all your needs met? This was a post purchase experience for your daughter's birthday. Would you buy from this store again? 

How it impacts your business: 

Influencing the post purchase experience will affect whether or not your customer will buy from you again. 61% of retailers say retention is the biggest challenge they face. So if you're not managing the post purchase part of your customer's buying journey, you're losing future sales. You lose the customer. It's 10x harder to bring back a lost customer, then it is to acquire a new one, but it's also cheaper to retain an existing customer. 

This is key for existing customers who buy on digital platforms. There isn't a sales rep to reassure the customer they made the right choice. Consider the positive impact you can make digitally to reassure the customer. Anything that goes wrong during this phase of the buying journey will impact your business sales. 

A 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase profits by 100% per customer. Be authentic and look at it from the customer's point of view. Provide access for easy return, and details on the return policy. Let the customer make the return, because they may have realized it was in fact not needed. Having this approach makes the customer feel reassured, and increases the likelihood they'll buy from you again at a later date. It's not just about making the one sale, it's about making every sale after that. The customer will feel valued no matter what they're coming in for, and will come back to buy again.

82% of customers experience buyer's remorse after the initial happy feeling of buying something wares off. Your business should be there at this point to reassure the customer, identify why they may feel this. Reinforce the value they receive buying your product, with support tools available and contact info for questions.

How to apply this:

What you should takeaway and apply to your digital sales strategy:

1. Improve post purchase experience

2. Identify emotions of buyer's remorse

3. Get customer feedback

Improve post purchase experience

Create an email series to thank the customer for their purchase, provide the necessary information to connect with you if they have questions or concerns. Reinforce the benefits they receive with buying your products and add in testimonials of other customers. 

This helps combat buyers remorse by showing the value and others who are happy with their purchase. You should still have the option and links for returns in the case this doesn't help, because you want to build a strong relationship with your customers. 

Identify emotions of buyer's remorse

Put together a plan to combat buyer's remorse based on different emotions a customer may feel. Identify what these emotions are and why they regret the buy. Do they not see the value anymore? Are they unsure of how to use your product? Do they have more questions to make sure they know how to use your product correctly? 

Consider a series of emails at different points in time based on customer behaviour. Use this to provide the right information at the right time. Do you need a specific team to manage this portion of the journey? 

Get customer feedback

When a customer does have buyer's remorse and wants to return the product this is a great opportunity to gain some insights. Ask the customer what changed their mind, understand the issue and address it. If one customer feels this way, more probably do as well. Use this to update your marketing messages and value propositions. Focus on these items to address during the buying journey so customers don't feel this post purchase. 

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