Post-purchase emails: How to find the right timing in your own purchase data
Getting the first order is only the beginning. The real challenge starts when you try to figure out when and how to bring customers back. Convincing someone to buy from you is very different from giving them a reason to buy from you again. Besides that, it’s not only about giving reasons. It’s also about understanding when customers are likely to need something again and identifying opportunities for more purchases.
Geneviève Masioni, a retention and email strategist, in her recent work with a brand that struggled to gain repeat buyers, shared her experience and ways of making customer retention straightforward at the RARE conference.
In this article, we’ll dive into this experience to define a repeat buyer and outline the three main steps that will help your customers stay with you for more purchases.
Who is a repeat buyer, and why are they important
You may think that any number of purchases greater than one can give your customer the status of a repeat buyer. But that’s only half the truth. Each purchase your buyer makes has a certain behavior behind it.
I consider a repeat buyer to be someone who’s placed at least three orders. Order one is a trial order. It’s heavily influenced by acquisition and welcome incentives like discounts. The second order is validation, where the customer validates that the product is for them. Order three is when we start seeing repeat buying behavior.
Repeat buyers already trust a brand and know its products and their value. Three placed orders are a perfect mark for you to start thinking about ways to retain this trust.
How to make your first buyers stay with you
Let’s imagine that you have around 50,000 buyers, and you see that only 1,500 of them have made three or more purchases. Most marketers immediately rework their communication with customers and introduce new offers, discounts, and other ways to encourage another purchase. At this point, you are taking a trial-and-error approach to see which of your actions “click” and help those repeat buyer numbers start to grow. However, when it comes to customer retention, only consistency and carefully calculated steps can yield results.
The shift I invite you to make is to diagnose customer behaviors before optimizing your email flows. Once you analyze your sales data and your voice of customer, your strategy will become blatantly obvious.
Geneviève Masioni,
Step 1: Segmentation based on transitions
The first thing you need to do to turn things around is figure out who in your audience needs an extra push to buy, and why. Geneviève Masioni had a case where, out of 49,000 buyers, only 1,281 were repeat buyers, and this required careful analysis to understand where people were getting stuck in their purchase journeys.
My first decision was to build the post-purchase strategy around the hardest transitions between orders, not the entire audience of buyers. Instead of having one post-purchase flow for every buyer, I segmented the post-purchase flow to guide people through the hardest transitions.
Geneviève Masioni,
The results of the initial analysis showed that these 1,281 repeat buyers represented less than 2% of the entire email list, and it was time to understand why this figure was so low.
The best way to do this is to analyze your post-purchase experience:
- determine which products customers purchase, how frequently these products require replacement or repurchase, and whether they involve regular use;
- analyze the post-purchase experience and how you interact with the customer after the sale (e.g., whether the customer receives instructions, helpful tips, support, or recommendations).
Once this is done, it’s time to figure out when a customer drop-off occurs. You can provide all confirmations and shipping updates and create a clear post-purchase flow, but if your flow lacks a nudge toward the next purchase, this may prevent buyers from returning to you.
In Geneviève’s case, 63% of the list had placed exactly one order, 7% had placed two, and fewer than 2% had reached three or more, which means that the hardest transition is between the first and second orders and another one between the second and third. These transitions can be your main branches to work with, but there is another one that you should keep in mind and work with, too.
I mapped three branches. The first branch was going to help people reach order two. The second branch was going to help customers reach order three. And the third branch was going to help repeat buyers keep progressing through orders four and five.
Geneviève Masioni,
(Source: Presentation from Geneviève Masioni)
Step 2: Tipping point and timing formula
You know who fell off at which purchase stage. Now, it’s time to shape your re-engagement strategy. Right now, it’s all about the timing of when you reach your buyer. To understand the perfect timing, you must analyze the purchase history of your audience and focus on frequency, which shows the natural rhythm of how often they buy from you.
You can map purchase frequency to get a clear picture of the patterns that indicate how much time it takes to move between each order.
In Geneviève’s case, she managed to map the following pattern:
- from order 1 to order 2: around 85 days;
- from order 2 to order 3: around 100 days;
- from order 3 to order 4: around 100 days;
- from order 4 to order 5: around 50 days;
- after order 5: around 38 days.
The rule behind these dates is simple: Take the average gap between two orders and subtract about 10 days. If your customers need 85 days to reorder, your email goes out on day 75, while interest is still high and the decision is open.
These figures can be different for you, but what’s important is that they allow you to see the natural tipping points in your customer journey between orders.
The tipping point means the order after which purchase frequency increases and people buy frequently, almost naturally, without being incentivized to do so. For this brand, the tipping point was order five.
Geneviève Masioni,
Besides that, you’ll see friction points where transitions are the hardest, and these points are the main things to address with re-engagement for a new order.
As stated earlier, it’s all about timing, so you should reach your customers a few days before a possible purchase. Taking Geneviève’s case as an example, the re-engagement time for each order should look like this:
- purchase 1 requires re-engagement around day 75;
- purchase 2 requires re-engagement around day 100;
- purchase 3 also requires re-engagement on day 100;
- purchase 4 requires re-engagement on day 45;
- purchase 5 requires re-engagement on day 33.
Keep in mind that the 10-day re-engagement window is an approximate figure. See it as your starting hypothesis, as intervals come from the behavior of the few customers who already reorder, so recalculate them as more one-time buyers reach order 3 and give you a bigger sample.
Step 3: Message arc
We’ve figured out who to work with and when. The last thing you need to think through is how you are going to communicate to encourage repeat purchases.
Sales data tell you what people did, not why they did it. In this case, the two did not add up: The product lasts between nine and 16 months, yet after order 5, customers were reordering every 38 days. Nothing in the emails was pushing them to, so something other than running out was driving those purchases. The answer was in the reviews.
Your starting point in the analysis should be sales data and customer feedback on your products or services. Product reviews can give you valuable insights into the thought processes of your customers and why their purchase journey looks the way it does.
Geneviève conducted research to figure out how customers think, and this led her to the following conclusions:
- order 1 was all about purchasing for themselves and trying the product for the first time;
- orders 2-3 highlighted the good quality of the product, which exceeded customers’ initial expectations since they had quite a few preconceived notions and doubts about its quality;
- orders 4-5+ were characterized by purchases as gifts for family members and friends.
At its core, each of these order stages represents a separate branch that requires a different message to encourage subsequent orders.
For branch one, I needed to build confidence and remove doubts around the product. Branch two was about strengthening their habits and expanding their usage. And finally, branch three was about reinforcing loyalty and encouraging gifting.
Geneviève Masioni,
Remember the offers marketers try to push in the hope of bringing customers back for more purchases? There’s also a vital thing tied to them. Once you know what message to push, you can use offers to support your message. All different bundles, loyalty programs, and referral programs must strengthen your initial message.
For example:
- the first branch message is “this product is good for me and will last,” which will benefit from bundles featuring this specific product and supporting goods;
- the second branch message is “who else around me can benefit from this product,” and a good offer for it would be loyalty programs for continuous purchases and bundles;
- the third branch has a message like “this one is a good gift,” and that’s where referral and loyalty programs will be good things to offer.
Three branches mean three sets of emails that share a structure and differ in message. Modules in Stripo keep that manageable: Build the header and the product block once and save them as synchronized modules. A single edit applies across all three flows at once.
What this strategy is projected to bring
All of the above is just good talk if there are no numbers to support it. And that’s where the numbers come in. Geneviève shared her estimates for this specific repeat buyer strategy case, and the projection was around $39,000 to $119,000 in annual revenue from converting one-time buyers into repeat buyers. And keep in mind that the full results of this approach are yet to come.
Wrapping up
Bringing your first-time buyers back is much easier when you have three important things in mind.
The right post-purchase strategy really starts with three simple questions. “Who needs help reaching the next milestone?” “When are they naturally ready to buy again?” “And what do they need to hear to take action?”.
Geneviève Masioni,
The answers to these questions provide the insights needed to refine your email strategy, ensuring that your calls to action, offers, and messages don’t fall on deaf ears. You gain a clear picture of the entire purchasing journey, specifically what drives repeat purchases, which makes it much easier to brainstorm new offers and other formats designed to encourage subsequent sales.
Most importantly, following these three steps can yield far greater benefits and profits than constantly seeking out new customers to replace those who leave after a single purchase. Proper segmentation, precise timing, and the right messaging are the pillars of an ideal post-purchase strategy.
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