How To Boost Your Post-Purchase Strategy With Loyalty Building Tactics

As most marketers know the journey doesn't stop once a customer completes a purchase. On the contrary,  in order to keep retaining customers, brands need to continue engaging with customers using a dedicated post-purchase strategy. This also is a vital opportunity to begin planting the seeds of customer loyalty, especially among new or first-time purchasers.

Brands looking to grow customer retention and foster long-lasting loyalty among their customers can incorporate loyalty-building tactics into their post-purchase strategy, even if they don't currently have a full-fledged loyalty program. In fact, most of these ideas can help brands without customer loyalty programs get a viewpoint into how implementing loyalty drivers can lead to better business success. 

Post-Purchase Strategies To Drive Customer Loyalty

Offering Rewards For Actions

Take the outdoor apparel brand Keep Nature Wild. When it launched its customer loyalty program, new enrollees had the chance to earn their first rewards points right off the bat. New members earned enough points to already qualify for free shipping or a $5 off coupon just by signing up and following Keep Nature Wild social media accounts. They continue earning even more points in typical methods — making purchases, writing product reviews, and referring friends and family.

If you want customers to take specific actions post-purchase, rewards and incentives can be great methods to motivate key customer behaviors. Obviously, one goal is for customers to continue making more purchases, but you can also use incentives to drive other key goals such as collecting more product reviews, increasing participation rates in company surveys, or getting more customer referrals.

Celebrating Key Milestones Or Events

Studies have shown that celebrating milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, spending thresholds, and more are part of the "small wins" that boost customer engagement and keep customers invested in your brands. Enrollment anniversaries, first purchase anniversaries, and even your brand’s birthday is a good opportunity to celebrate with your customers. Loyalty programs let you take celebrating even further because you can use data insights collected within your loyalty program to personalize the celebration to specific customers. 

A customer loyalty program can help you capture and analyze the data that's crucial for creating targeted and personalized customer experiences. By understanding your customers' preferences, purchase history, and behavior, you can tailor your rewards and communications to their individual needs. Instead of just offering a generic discount code or bonus points for a customer’s birthday you could include items from their wishlists or favorited rewards with a message inviting them to spend their gift on rewards they’ve been wanting. Personalized recommendations, birthday surprises, or exclusive offers based on their favorite products can make customers feel valued and strengthen their connection to your brand.

If your loyalty program includes member tiers, you could even use customer data to show how they can combine their birthday awards or bonus points with a product purchase can move them closer to qualifying for the next tier level or even bump them up completely. An integrated loyalty program will give you the ability to send these types of customized offers and more as part of your post-purchase strategy.

Promote Relevant Cross-Selling And Upselling Offers

Customers who purchase from you most likely did so for specific reasons: they had a specific need or want, the price was right, the product quality or amount was ideal, or they had an opportunity to take advantage of a good deal or price. Depending on what they bought and why, there could be opportunities for you to send them different cross-sell or upsell offers at some point during their post-purchase stage.

However, it's important to understand your customer's mindset when creating your post-purchase outreach and follow-up, especially when it comes to sending promotional product offers. What you don't want to do is go overboard or seem out of touch with your customers. For example, if a customer just bought a refrigerator, chances are they’re not going to need another refrigerator for at least a while. Sending them a promotional email advertising more special deals on refrigerators will likely get you some confused or annoyed reactions. 

Instead, look for opportunities to send customers special promotions for related categories or products. In the above example, we can assume a refrigerator purchase means the customer will be buying food and cooking. Different cooking tools or utensils, food storage supplies, and even fun items like themed ice-cube molds are all good ideas for related product options you could include in your post-purchase communications. If you use a customer loyalty program, this is also a good opportunity to include a few of a customer's saved products or wishlist items.

You can also incorporate other products that are not directly related to a customer's purchase using loyalty program data. For example, if a customer 1) bought a refrigerator, 2) has redeemed rewards points in the past for a cooler embossed with a college football team's logo, and 3) has sports gear or equipment on their rewards wishlists, the odds are good that customer is a sports fan. This gives you more opportunities to send them personalized offers or deals that directly appeal to their interests. The more targeted your offers can be, the better your chance of success.

Look For Ways To Boost Customer Engagement

A good portion of loyalty program tactics are geared towards the transactional - meaning they're centered on incentivizing customer purchases. However, focusing too much on transactions can have negative consequences if you're trying to build customer relationships.

Consider this: if customers only interact with your brand or loyalty program when they make a purchase, then they have little reason to engage with your brand outside the buying cycle. They won't have any reason at all to keep interacting with your brand if their buying rate slows down or stops entirely.

It's much harder to build long-term customer loyalty solely using transaction-based customer engagement tactics. 

Now modern customer loyalty programs are finding more success in retaining customers by focusing on building relationships through customer engagement. Non-transactional customer engagements get more traction when creating an emotional connection between brand and customer, and also give customers reasons to keep interacting with your program even when they aren't making a purchase. These engagements help keep your brand top-of-mind even when the customer isn't in a buying state. 

If you're looking for more ideas on how to incorporate customer loyalty tactics into your customer retention strategy, we can help! Get in touch with us today.