The Customer Journey: Post-Purchase

In this fourth part of our Customer Journey series, we’re focusing on the post-purchase stage.

As we’ve mentioned, Chat Marketing is a fluid strategy that radically shifts the trajectory of the customer purchasing journey. Instead of a linear funnel, the decision journey becomes a cycle where the brand can continually re-engage the customer over time. No matter if a customer has just heard of your brand or if they made a purchase three months ago, Chat Marketing enables you to provide every customer with the same amount of nurturing, continuous engagement, and selling/upselling. That’s how your brand stays top of mind throughout the entire customer journey.

But there’s a common mistake we’ve seen marketers make in the past: they treat the purchasing stage as if it’s the end of the funnel. They’re so focused on getting people to buy they forget that a customer’s journey continues long after they make that first purchase. And then, when the brand realizes they need to re-engage that customer, they do so with disparate messaging, like static emails and digital ads, that aren’t effective because they don’t provide the customer with the right information at the right time. Instead, the brand appears out of touch and not focused on the individual customer.

So how can brands reach customers post-purchase in a way that’s personalized and seamlessly integrated with their previous marketing efforts, while also turning one-time buyers into loyal customers?

With Chat Marketing, brands don’t need to devise an entirely separate retargeting and re-engagement strategy. They won’t need to waste money on follow-up ads or emails people will most likely ignore, nor will they struggle to resonate with individual customers. Since Chat Marketing is so frictionless, following up post-purchase is a natural and easy progression from the purchasing stage.

Immediately after purchase, the brand can message the customer with shipping information, smart order tracking via AI, a receipt notice, a thank-you message, and more. Once the customer has received the item, the brand can send them training videos, product-review questions, and they can offer additional assistance with the item.

Next, at preset times following the purchase, the brand can engage the customer again for incremental sales. And they can do so in a highly customized, targeted way: instead of merely sending a general message about their product offerings, they can upsell and cross-sell more strategically and more personally.

Say a customer buys a black winter coat. A few months later, the brand can recommend a similar style of jacket for the fall. Or before summer, they can offer summer clothes from the same line in that customer’s size. Or they can recommend new winter boots or a scarf that’ll match the jacket for the following winter. The more the brand interacts with the customer, the more they gather first-party data and insights on the customer’s taste, their purchasing habits, and their specific needs.

That is how the brand shifts the customer from one-time shopper to loyal regular. Since the brand “knows” the customer through through their data and their interactions, there’s no limit to the amount of customization, intimate support, and creative engagement they can offer.

That’s why Chat Marketing is the ultimate in dynamic retargeting. It’s the most personalized, most engaging way to keep customers connected to your brand over the long term. It’s also the best way to convert your shoppers into long-term customers. Since the brand is continually engaging with the customer, they know exactly when to re-message them, and they know what message is most likely to resonate. Marketing is no longer an elaborate guessing game. It’s more strategic, more targeted, and more controlled.

Chat Marketing is a unified strategy across all your most important customer-oriented functions: customer service, sales, shipping, product, and more. In a chatbot, all these functions are collapsed into a single, direct conversation with the customer. And if the customer wants to contact the brand to discuss the product or to receive help, they can do so easily and painlessly.

Learn more about how Chat Marketing can help your brand at Chatkit.com.

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