TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was completed by an automated system, please forgive any grammatical errors.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
branded tracking, customers, merchants, strategy, post-purchase experience, delivered, lesson, shopify, consumers, drive, agency, platform, moment, order, goals, package, run
SPEAKERS
Yaw Aning, Mariah Parsons
Mariah Parsons 00:05
Greetings and welcome to retention Chronicles, the podcast with learnings from expert e commerce brands and partners. I'm your host, Ryan Parsons. If you're here, you're either on a quest for ecommerce enlightenment, or you accidentally clicked the wrong link. Either way, I am thrilled you stumbled into our corner of the internet. And I hope you'll stick around. We've got pearls of wisdom for everyone, whether you're running a multimillion dollar business, or simply just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey. Before we unleash the brilliance of today's guest, let's give a shout out to our podcast sponsor Malomo. Malomo is so much more than just another Shopify app, their post purchase wizards making beautiful and branded order tracking smoother than a jazz solo. So our amazing founders, like our guests can keep their customers happy and up to date while they track their orders. So hit that subscribe button, like it'll increase your LTV overnight, and go listen to her other episodes echo malomo.com That's gomalomo.com Get ready for insights chuckles and perhaps a profound realization or two, with this newest episode of retention. Hello, everyone, this is your host, Mariah. I'm just popping in to share that this episode is a little bit different from our normal schedule. It was recorded during a webinar, but after the fact we realized it was packed with such great strategy that we wanted to share it on this podcast. So you'll hear from our co founder and CEO Yao winning, and he's going to share 10 lessons in the post purchase space that he's learned from working with upwards of 5000 Shopify brands. So we hope you'll enjoy and tune in next week for our regular episode.
Yaw Aning 02:04
I'll do a quick intro My name is Yaw Aning, I'm the co founder and CEO of Malomo Morin border tracking platform for high growth merchants. Before launch mobile I started in ran a dev agency called sticks and leaves for about seven years, we built 100 Plus apps and websites for direct to consumer software and ecommerce businesses. And after seeing several ecommerce businesses struggle around improving their post purchase experience, my co founder and I decided to pivot our agency and focus solely on this problem in that company today is mobile. So I've had the privilege of speaking with 1000s of Shopify merchants, the past four years at Malomo, and the prior seven years of my agency. So today, I'm going to boil down those conversations into 10. Lessons about post purchase experience. Amazing. So first, let's let's dive in. So lesson one, and it's an easy one, understand your post purchase default settings. So this probably sounds obvious, but it's one of the most overlooked things merchants do. So many merchants had absolutely no idea what experience is being delivered after a customer bought from them. They were unsure of what emails were sent, you know, to customers who was sending them what platform they're coming from, if they were even delivered, where they were driving customers to actually track their packages. list goes on. So that's the first thing I recommend people do is understand what the current experience looks like and get a baseline understanding of what's going on. If you're using Shopify's post purchase, the default settings for your email notifications and tracking page probably look something like this. One of the first things I recommend doing is actually being a consumer of your store, right going in placing an order and seeing what the experience is like firsthand. And then make note of all the touch points you're delivering, or lack thereof that you'd expect to see. So you may be surprised in both a good way and bad way about what your customers are experiencing when they buy from you. And understanding that first and foremost is really key to figuring out what to do and how to improve. Lesson two, it's not about the features of any one post purchase platform, but rather your brand strategy that will determine your success. So it's easy to get lost in a list of all the features one platform might have versus another and then make your buying decision based on you know, the vendor that has the most number of things. And this doesn't just go for a post purchase platform or it goes for any platform. where the problem is that software vendors you know we are really great at selling our features. So we'll often convince you and vendors will often convince you right that you'll need features that you may not need or ever use. So instead of letting the vendor drive your buying strategy, you'll be amazed at how clear your buying decisions become when you first folk Based on your brand strategy, and then how the platform can effectively help you unlock that strategy. In this way you're basing your decisions on what you actually need and not what the vendor tells you you need. If you're not sure how to formulate your strategy, here's a really great quick exercise, start broad with your goals and then go narrow over time. So when thinking about post purchase, the offensive merchants will end up falling into three buckets. Do you want your post purchase experience to be a CX and support channel to really communicate with your customers and grab that support tickets, a brand building a channel to really elevate the brand? In your in your consumers mind? Or is this a revenue channel are you trying to drive cross sell and upsell post purchase during during the order tracking experience? Once you choose a bucket, then narrow it even further from there. For example, if we want our post purchase experience to be a brand building channel, then we need to think about what are the ways in which we could build brands, right, we could reinforce the mission, we could entertain people while they wait for their order. We could educate them and make them better informed of the brand of the products that they bought. So you know, once you have that strategy, for example, if you choose education, right, once you have that strategy, it's easier to then think about how you want the tracking experience to manifest that strategy. And then choose the best software platform to partner with to help you realize your vision. aren't speaking of education. Lesson three is that consumers absolutely love it when you educate them about your brand during post purchase. So click through rates that we've seen across Education Center content, see a ton of engagement. Education can take many different forms, right, it can be product centric, like here creative ways to use or consume the product, tips for how to get the most out of the product, or even instructions on how to care for the product to make sure it keeps longevity. But they can also be centric, like highlighting your mission, or having the founder share the founding story of the brand. To give you a quick example house, an average teeth apertivo Drink brand combines a few of these elements in a really compelling way on their tracking experience. They share everything from how to store your bottle between uses, recipe ideas, and even what to do when you've consumed at all like how to upcycle the bottles as a Flower Builder. Just super clever way to keep the brand front and center even well after that consumers done using the product. Okay, lesson four, you shouldn't invest in a post purchase experience just to check it off your list of things to implement, because you saw some other cool or innovative brand doing it. Right order tracking is a super intimate channel. Your customers emotions are in a heightened state of both excitement about the package arriving and anxiety hoping that it makes it to them. And so you should deliver an experience that is representative of what you stand for. Right? Think about the DNA of your brand. What makes it special and unique. When you start from from that creating the right experience actually becomes effortless. Right? Try not to look at what everyone else is doing. Do what feels right and natural for you and what your brand stands for. Alright, Lesson five merchants that developed a great experience first set goals based on their strategy. We've all probably heard the same, right? What gets measured gets managed. So if you don't know what you're optimizing for, your experience will show it will feel uncoordinated and disjointed. So depending on your strategy, if you don't know where to start, like here are your a couple of example metrics you might want to track. So if your goal is customer experience, you might want to start measuring the percentage of quarters that are experiencing a problem. For example, you might want to look at your performance and get against your fulfillment or your carrier SLAs. Right? How on time are we delivering our packages, you might also want to look at the number of support tickets related to shipping and trying to drive those things down over time. If your strategy might be more revenue centric, you might be looking at repeat revenue might be looking at conversion rates, or or even retained revenue, right how many people bought from us and didn't cancel their order because their problem their order experienced some sort of problem during delivery. Alternatively, if your strategy is more brand centric during post purchase, you might look at the number of tracking impressions that you're delivering, right. The engagement rate that's happening on the tracking experience, what are the things that people are engaging with? What percent If people are engaging with content versus not, you also might be looking at click through rate or, or the the amount of traffic that's coming back to your storefront that's sourced from your tracking experience. So lots of great goals to start off with if you're just getting into post purchase experience. All right, every merchant I know is in a perpetual state of implementing new tools. I don't know, like how you guys find any time to do anything else, but you're constantly implementing new tools and campaigns. And so oftentimes, it's hard to execute a post purchase strategy effectively, we've seen that merchants that partnered with an agency to help get their post purchase experience up, were actually step ahead. They moved faster, they optimized more, they saw much better results, they get some things that they were measuring, and I don't think that's coincidence, right? I highly recommend hiring an agency partner to work with, either get your experiences up or help you iterate and optimize the experience over time. If you need a recommendation, here's a great list of agencies who are way ahead of the game when it comes to post purchase strategy and execution. A few are even speaking today at DTC x. So make sure you you tune into those sessions. If you haven't. If you need a recommendation, feel free to reach out to us, you know, to based on your goals, your vertical what you're trying to accomplish. I'm happy to point you in the right direction. All right, Lesson Seven. As merchants start to plan out their experience, we often get asked how many notifications are too many. It's a hot button topic. I don't think that's necessarily the right question to ask. The key here is not to think about the number of notifications you're sending, but about the types of notifications and the value of each one to the customer. So to give you an analogy, let's say you're meeting a friend for dinner, you're supposed to meet at six to get to the restaurant at 620 minutes goes by your friend is nowhere to be seen. So you text them asking where they're at. And they let they let you know, you know they they're not actually going to get there to seven, you're probably pretty pissed off, right? Like if they were going to be laid, they let you know. I call that a key moment, right? Your customers care a lot about where their orders are. They check tracking on average four and a half times per order. Keeping them updated when things deviate from expectations is one of the most important things you can do to build trust with your customers. We often recommend our brands map out the customer journey with key moments around post purchase. And it's important to remember that not all of these messages are going to go out to every single customer. But when these events do happen, like a delay, or an exception, for example, they'll matter a lot in that moment to the customers that experience them. So make sure to plan a strategy for each moment are less than a start with a strong foundation that is built on trust and transparency with your customers. How can you develop trust? There are three super simple ways. One, be specific when you're following up with customers to be proactive when following up with customers. And three, be honest when you're following up with customers. This email from mongoose is a textbook and communication best practices. So they leave with an email that specifically calls out what's going wrong with the order that the shipping company couldn't deliver the package to them. They were proactive and letting the customer know exactly what happened. And what they should do next to ensure the package can be pre delivered right check the address make sure that the address is correct. If it is let us let our team know if it's not right reply back with the right address. And then their fun fact at the end at the bottom in pink. letting their customers know they're a small mom or run business is grateful for their customers is honest and transparent. Right in a moment that might be frustrating to consumers. They did all the right things to defuse any potential customer frustration, and actually turn that negative moment into a trust building moment that matters. All right, less than nine driving subscriptions is is a top of mind topic for many, many merchants right now. The ones that are winning with subscriptions. They make subscriptions an important part of their pre in their post purchase strategy. So I'm obviously gonna focus on the post purchase strategy here Soylent does something so smart where they actually segment their tracking experience to drive their subscription business. For subscribers. They send those customers to a tracking experience that is very brand centric credit, a really honorable Grand, great hero image content to reinforce the brand story underneath that, and then they do a really nice way of highlighting their mission and driving that mission through referrals. Really smart. While on the other hand, first time buyers right are showing the benefits of subscribing, some some of the most popular subscription products that that customer might be interested in. And then some product education. This strategy is potent and works extremely well to drive retention in the subscriber base and adoption from non subscribers. Alright, lesson 10. And this is a big one. While most people design their tracking experience for desktop first, mobile reign supreme. So have you seen that 83% of tracking views happen on a mobile device, it's not just about the tracking experience, right? It's it's also SMS and email to your customers are on the go. When you send them a delivery notification, you're likely interrupting them in between something that they're doing. So you need to design your experience for their lifestyle, and their lifestyle is usually mobile first. A lot of brands focus on boots, a lot of brands focus on conversion rate optimisation for the storefronts, right? You're testing all sorts of things to drive conversion during the purchase experience. So if I told you are driving 15% of your overall website traffic to your tracking experience, why would you not be testing testing your post purchase experience the same way right testing your H ones your navigation, your CTA aids Felina knows this and they actually run a different nav on their order tracking experience than for their purchase experience. Some left is the purchase experience and you'll see right they they show you the search in cart, because that's super important when you're browsing, but during the post purchase experience customers care more about delivery FAQs, doing returns or shopping again, it's important to think about where your customers are in their journey with your brand and what their needs will be in that moment. And then design and iterate your post purchase experience.