Powerful Post-Purchase Emails: 3 Examples

When a customer makes a purchase from your company, what happens next? Do you take the opportunity to connect further, or do you gently fade off into the horizon until your next scheduled offer lands in their inbox?

As we’ve stated before, the best time to engage your customer is immediately after they’ve engaged with you. When a customer makes a purchase, they’re feeling great. They’re riding a serotonin high and are fully engaged with your brand. This is a ripe opportunity to further engage these customers, to upsell, cross-sell and build enthusiastic brand evangelists.

Unfortunately, for many companies, triggered emails are little more than an afterthought. In fact, triggered emails make up less than 5% of overall email volume. But these emails can account for as much as 15% of revenue attributed to email-which gives you ample reason to take a second look at your triggered email strategy in general and, specifically, your post-purchase email strategy.

Here are three examples of brands doing post-purchase emails right:

1. Crate & Barrel

Sure, customers might be looking for a little love from your brand after they buy something for themselves. But what about customers buying for others? Crate & Barrel keeps the conversation going with customers who make purchases off of a wedding or gift registry. This may in fact be the most perfect opportunity possible for a cross-sell. After all, registry customers have undoubtedly reviewed and considered a wide range of potential gift items before making a final purchase decision. Their appetites have been thoroughly whetted. This post-purchase email offers shoppers an incentive to go ahead and purchase a little something for themselves, too, with a generous discount.

2. Ulta

Post-purchase emails don’t have to be about actively selling additional product. So long as you’re engaging, you’re doing it right. In this example, Ulta uses a customer purchase as an opportunity to merely extend the experience. By asking customers via email to review the products they purchase, the brand efficiently accomplishes two important goals:

• Customers must visit the Ulta website, ensuring they continue to interact with the Ulta brand, even after the purchase is complete.
• Other customers will see these reviews, ensuring the Ulta’s website contains rich, robust and valuable content their customers actively seek.

Not a bad return on investment for a simple triggered email.

3. Innovee

This Amazon kitchen product retailer proves post-purchase emails don’t have to be fancy to be effective. It also proves it doesn’t take much to stand out as a brand that cares about its customers.

While most Amazon sellers are content to let Amazon handle the transactional post-purchase emails, Innovee makes an effort to build a personal relationship with its customers by communicating with them directly-no matter how big or small the purchase may be. Even the relatively minor purchase of a lemon squeezer begets a series of emails, directly from the seller, to make sure the customer received the order, knows how to use the product and is satisfied with the purchase.

While well-designed templates certainly garner engagement, even simple, plain-text emails can make a big impact, dramatically increasing the likelihood customers will remember the Innovee name the next time they seek to purchase a kitchen item on Amazon.

No matter what goal you have in mind, a well-composed, well-timed post-purchase email can help you keep the conversation going and keep customers engaged with your brand.

Looking for more ways to stand out in your subscriber’s inbox? Check out this case study to learn how one company used purchase data to drive a 13% increase in open rates!