Published November 15, 2024

Post-Purchase Marketing: How to Engage Customers After They Buy

Customer expectations for a positive ecommerce experience are at an all-time high. As a result, ecommerce companies that are looking to reach the next level find themselves in an environment that’s more competitive than it’s ever been. This represents a challenge, but also a major opportunity for companies that know what to do with it.

This competitive environment naturally leads companies to lower their prices, but that’s not the only lever for these companies to pull. By optimizing their customer journey—especially during its post-purchase phase—companies can engineer a rare, win-win scenario in which customers and businesses can both benefit.

Post-purchase marketing, when done well, helps companies remain competitive, enhance the customer experience, and generate ancillary revenue through relevant internal or third-party offers.

In this article, we’ll explore how ecommerce companies can put their customers first while generating increased, incremental revenue from non-endemic (third-party) advertisers as well as internal initiatives. We’ll also cover key aspects of post-purchase marketing, including its meaning, purpose, and best practices for implementing the best possible strategies. Finally, you should have a good understanding of how a platform like Rokt can provide the insights and tools you need to boost profits and generate customer loyalty in the post-purchase space.

What does post-purchase mean?

The phrase “post-purchase,” meaning the actions (and interactions) that occur in the moments directly following an online purchase, has a unique value for both customers and marketers. Let’s break down each part of a transaction first, and then we’ll explore how well-designed purchasing processes and post-purchase strategies can lead to not only a better and more productive customer experience, but ancillary revenue for your ecommerce business as well.

What is “post-purchase” in the customer journey?

The typical ecommerce customer journey consists of five distinct stages, including awareness, consideration, decision, retention, and advocacy.

Within an ecommerce context, the two initial stages—awareness and consideration—aren’t very different from their “traditional” counterparts. First, customers become familiar with a particular product, service, or brand (“awareness”), and then they begin to evaluate specific products, services, and offers (“consideration”) looking for the most relevant and cost-effective solution for their unique needs.

Once they have evaluated their options, the customer ultimately decides to purchase from one brand over another. With ecommerce, though, the customer journey also tends to be more than just a singular action. Instead, it’s often more experience-based and consists of multiple micro-decisions as customers work through the checkout process. We call this the Transaction Moment™, a crucial moment that includes the “post-purchase” phase at the end (also known as the Confirmation and Thank You Pages).

What is the Transaction Moment, and why is it so important?

When we talk about the Transaction Moment, we’re talking about the brief—yet pivotal—span of time from when a customer adds something to their cart through the payment process and after they check out. In other words, the Transaction Moment spans all the steps “from cart to confirmation.”

From a competitive standpoint, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of the Transaction Moment. Crucially, it’s when customers are in the buying mindset and feeling favorably about your brand and its offerings. It’s also when they’re most engaged and less likely to be distracted by other matters.

Especially within industries like travel, ticketing, retail, and media—where around 90% of their ancillary revenue is generated during the Transaction Moment—it’s difficult to overstate the importance of effective post-purchase marketing.

The Transaction Moment is the ideal time to introduce relevant offers, as the customer is already committed to their base purchase. The more relevant and valuable they find your suggested offers to be, the more likely they are to convert (increasing value for the customer and providing an additional revenue source).

By providing a smooth checkout process and offers relevant to each customer, companies can unlock additional revenue and increase brand loyalty through the final stages of the ecommerce customer journey: retention and advocacy.

What is an example of the post-purchase process?

In ecommerce, the post-purchase process specifically refers to the Confirmation and Thank You Pages of the Transaction Moment, in which customers have completed payment and have received acknowledgement of their purchase. By this point customers have moved from an exploratory mindset (considering various products or services) to a more narrowly-defined buying mindset. Order confirmation and thank you pages provide unique, immediate opportunities to connect with consumers and generate additional revenue through the best offers at the best time.

These moments are a valuable opportunity for companies to generate ancillary revenue from add-on products or services, or to introduce other relevant offers based on the item(s) in the customer’s cart. For example, on its confirmation pages, the Cinemark movie theater chain offers gift cards for purchase (inspiring customer loyalty and increasing revenue), as well as compelling third-party offers from leading brands.

It’s important here to note, however, that simply serving up post-purchase offers isn’t enough—to succeed, the offers need to be relevant, timely, and tailored to each customer’s priorities and preferences. Otherwise, you risk giving customers the impression that you’re just bombarding them with offers with little regard for what actually benefits them. It’s a quick way to turn customers off and paint your own brand in a negative light.

What is an example of post-purchase behavior?

Depending on the type of transaction—as well as the industry, product/service type, and other factors—customers might engage in a number of different post-purchase behaviors (both positive and, unfortunately, not-so-positive). Some of their positive behaviors could include:

Writing and publishing reviews of their purchase

Engaging with relevant third-party and internal offers after they purchase

Sharing their experience with the brand and its products/services on social media

Recommending the product/service or brand to their friends, family, or colleagues

Engaging with the brand on social media

Making repeat purchases or purchasing additional products or services

Joining a customer loyalty or rewards program (if offered)

Of course, it’s no guarantee that every customer is going to have a positive experience. Customers tend to be more vocal about negative experiences than positive ones—and it’s only become more skewed as more business is being conducted online. Social media and other digital channels empower consumers with a powerful megaphone they can use to tell others about their experiences. This makes it even more important for ecommerce companies to tailor shopping experiences—and especially checkout processes—to their customers’ preferences and expectations, as they’ll quickly tune out irrelevant offers (and wonder whether you really have their interests at heart).

What factors impact a customer’s post-purchase behavior?

There are two main factors that impact a customer’s post-purchase behavior—including their decision whether to take advantage of additional offers: the overall customer experience and what happens during the transaction itself.

The overall customer experience is one of the most important competitive differentiators for companies across virtually every industry. Customers want to buy from companies that make them feel understood and valued, companies that are easy to do business with, and companies they can trust.

From the initial, “awareness” stage of the customer journey, they’re often evaluating both the products or services and the brand experience itself. This extends to post-purchase behavior, as well. Immediately after they’ve made a purchase, they expect companies to be relevant, responsive, and helpful throughout the post-purchase process.

The post-purchase experience—specifically, the way you show appreciation and the post-purchase offer(s) you promote—can be the difference between a one-time purchaser and a loyal customer. After they’ve purchased, customers don’t want to feel like they’re being taken advantage of or pressured into additional products or services that aren’t relevant, meaning any post-purchase offers should reward and delight customers by being both timely and relevant.

This is where many brands struggle, and wind up throwing too many offers at customers, which can feel impersonal or random. The best post-purchase experiences are effectively tailored to individual customers, underscoring the importance of well-curated data and actionable customer insights.

What is the post-purchase stage of marketing?

While many marketers naturally focus on creating brand awareness and generating leads, the purchasing and post-purchasing stages of the customer journey also provide compelling opportunities to strengthen relationships while generating additional revenue, including through third-party advertisers. After all, customers aren’t typically just buying a product or service—they’re also forming a relationship with your brand and looking for complementary offers, highlighting the important role of considering customers’ post-purchase behavior in your marketing strategy.

In other words, each one of your company’s post-purchase touchpoints provide an opportunity to showcase your brand’s customer-centricity. Some common post-purchase marketing activities include:

Sending a timely order confirmation, including outreach to let them know that you appreciate their purchase and want them to be happy

Serving up relevant recommendations for additional, related products or services

Establishing customer advocacy and referral programs, and encouraging satisfied customers to recommend the brand to others

The point of these activities is two-fold. Through effective post-purchase marketing, companies can unlock additional revenue while providing the kind of relevance and value that drives brand loyalty. In other words, it’s a win-win proposition for customers and ecommerce businesses.

Why is post-purchase so important?

As noted earlier, the modern customer is often empowered by having plenty of competition for their business—and they’re often evaluating brands or companies with at least as much scrutiny as they apply to evaluating products, services, and offers. The better you understand your customers, their priorities and interests, and what influences their post-purchase behaviors, the better-positioned you’ll be to build better relationships— and generate ancillary, incremental revenue.

What are the benefits of post-purchase marketing?

When done well, post-purchase marketing provides many benefits, each of which can ultimately contribute to a more relevant customer experience, as well as additional revenue. Broadly speaking, the benefits of post-purchase marketing include the ability to:

Inspire repeat sales and generate additional revenue from third-party advertisers

Differentiate your brand and its offerings from the competition

Motivate customers to purchase additional products or services

Generate positive reviews for your brand and its product/service offerings

Create loyal customers and brand advocates

Gain additional incremental revenue through partnerships and third–party ads

The key to achieving these objectives for your brand or business all comes down to understanding and optimizing the Transaction Moment—and engaging the best customers with the best offers at the best time.

How do you engage customers post-purchase?

Most companies, on some level, understand the importance of post-purchase behavior, but they don’t always know how—or when—to engage with customers in a way that generates positive outcomes. As noted above, the key to post-purchase engagement is understanding and optimizing the Transaction Moment.

What are the 3 post-purchase outcomes?

For customers, the top three outcomes of post-purchase marketing are:

Customer satisfaction: A satisfied customer is always good for business; your product or service is meeting the customer’s basic needs and expectations.

Brand loyalty: When customers are more than satisfied with their purchase—as well as the buying experience and overall value (vs. your competitors’ offerings)—you can expect them to become loyal to your brand, likely making repeat purchases over time.

Brand advocacy: When customers are more than satisfied with their experience with your brand, they aren’t just more likely to do future business with you—they’re also going to tell others about it. Sharing their positive experiences on social media, for example, generates the kind of positive word-of-mouth recommendations that can have a real impact on your business.

The likelihood of each of these outcomes can be increased through a positive customer experience and efficient purchasing process, as well as effective post-purchase customer service and support.

On the other side of the transaction, we have ecommerce companies. Like customers, these companies can also benefit from three positive outcomes of post-purchase marketing:

Revenue generation: By providing timely and relevant offers when customers are in the buying mindset, companies can unlock additional, incremental revenue. These might include internal offers—like a discount on products, services, or features they already sell—or relevant third-party offers.

Customer insights: The better-equipped an organization is to understand its customers, the more effective it can be with its post-purchase marketing strategies. The Rokt platform makes it easy to derive actionable, real-time insights into the types of relevant offers that can spur additional, incremental revenue.

Customer loyalty: In both the short- and long-term, keeping existing customers satisfied is more cost-effective than constantly having to find new markets to engage and convert. Prioritizing relevance during the Transaction Moment is a great way to generate additional revenue while still demonstrating that you understand and value each customer that engages with your brand.

For ecommerce customers and companies alike, the likelihood of each of these outcomes can be increased through a positive customer experience and efficient purchasing process, as well as effective post-purchase customer service and support.

Next, let’s explore the challenges of crafting the ideal Transaction Moment for your customers—and how they can be mitigated with the right post-purchase marketing strategies.

What are the challenges of post-purchase marketing?

For many companies, being able to effectively reach, understand, and influence customers through the Transaction Moment and beyond sometimes proves challenging. They understand the basics of post-purchase marketing and are clear on its value, and yet they find it difficult to identify the right offers and opportunities for unlocking ancillary revenue. Here, it’s also important to emphasize that post-purchase marketing doesn’t just mean maximizing sales for an organization’s core offerings. In many cases, post-purchase marketing strategies can be enhanced by offering meaningful, non-endemic ads and offers as well.

At the end of the day, it’s all about generating post-purchase satisfaction, as opposed to post-purchase dissonance (also known as buyer’s remorse). So, what are the three primary challenges to be aware of when it comes to understanding—and meeting—each customer’s needs and expectations?

Challenge #1: Understanding what customers want

Choosing the right strategies requires the company to really understand its customers expectations and preferences, and to tailor the customer’s buying journey accordingly.

When it comes to delivering a relevant experience, the deeper and more actionable the customer data that’s available, the better. A platform like Rokt puts actionable customer insights right at ecommerce companies’ fingertips, making it much easier for them to engage their customers with relevant complementary offers during the Transaction Moment, when they’re more likely to take advantage of them.

While virtually every company will claim to understand exactly what their customers want, the only way to truly know is by utilizing what you already know about your customers (first-party data, in other words). And while most companies are always handling data, it’s not always easy to convert it into actionable insights. With Rokt, ecommerce companies can take advantage of their own first party data to deliver relevant messages/offers to customers that they’ll actually want.

Challenge #2: Determining the right strategy or strategies

Once companies understand the opportunities that come with post-purchase marketing strategies, they have to craft the right approach for their brand. This means thinking about how to optimize each customer touchpoint and build a memorable experience, which often includes:

Proactive, informative communication throughout the buying process—and especially during the checkout and post-purchase stages.

Accessible customer support, so if customers have questions or issues that arise, they know the company has their back.

Adopting a customer loyalty or rewards program, which can impact customer retention and lifetime value.

Ensuring that orders are processed correctly and delivered in a timely manner; most customers greatly appreciate not just on-time delivery but being informed about their order and shipping/delivery status.

Soliciting feedback from customers to gauge their post-purchase satisfaction.

Uncover opportunities for additional business.

It’s that last point—uncovering opportunities for additional business—that often provides the most significant gains. When customers are in the buying mindset and have already committed to buying your product or service, ecommerce businesses have the ideal time to suggest additional complementary products or services for their consideration.

Of course, trying to engage customers post-purchase is nothing new—and yet for many companies, a distinct challenge emerges: what are the right ancillary products or services to offer during the Transaction Moment? Often, this leads companies toward one of two ends of a spectrum.

At one end of this spectrum, companies identify one static offer, promoting it to every customer or transaction. This will undoubtedly inspire some customers to take advantage of the provided offer, though it will often feel impersonal. For other customers, the offer may be completely irrelevant, as they might have seen the ad many times, already have the offer, or simply be uninterested.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the companies that identify many different offers, and promote all of them to all of their customers. Again, a decent number of customers will likely take advantage of these offers, but others will feel like they’re just being overwhelmed with offers—a phenomenon that’s common enough to have a name: the paradox of choice.

What is the paradox of choice?

As a psychological concept, the paradox of choice refers to the phenomenon of experiencing distraction, decision fatigue, and dissatisfaction from having too many options to choose from (often leading customers to a non-choice).

Within the context of ecommerce, the paradox of choice primarily comes into play when companies serve up additional offers during the checkout process. It’s best to not bombard them with too many choices; rather it’s more important to provide only a few—but highly relevant—offers. And in some cases, it’s best to provide no ad at all.

Challenge #3: Optimizing the Transaction Moment

Throughout this article, we keep coming back to the importance of the Transaction Moment, for customers as well as companies. But what exactly can companies do to create a positive customer experience and increase their value per transaction? There are three keys:

Connecting at the right moment: As has been discussed throughout this article, the Transaction Moment represents a company’s best opportunity to generate additional incremental revenue. Customers are at their peak engagement during the Transaction Moment and are most likely to respond to relevant offers, especially if they occur in real time.

Personalizing the customer experience: The key to unlocking increased revenue is tailoring your offers to each customer, to whatever extent possible. Customers increasingly expect the companies they do business with to provide an experience that is tailored to their preferences. This experience can include offers that are non-endemic (not sold by the original ecommerce business), provided that these third-party offers are highly relevant to the customer’s interests and tastes.

Leveraging technology and data: In addition to being keys to optimizing the Transaction Moment, connecting at the right moment and personalizing the customer experience have another thing in common: They both require accurate, real time, and actionable information about customers and transactions. Uncovering the right insights and using them to inform your post-purchase marketing strategies is ultimately the x-factor in achieving consistent success.

In the past, it hasn’t always been easy to identify the right offers to provide during the Transaction Moment—and yet, relevance is vitally important.

That’s one of the ways Rokt’s platform can be such a powerful post-purchase marketing tool. The Rokt platform enables ecommerce businesses to leverage AI on their first-party data to deliver high-quality, actionable messages to their customers in real time. This includes using AI to predict the types of premium offers from non-endemic advertisers that each customer is most likely to find relevant and delivering these offers in real time.

In other words, an organization’s own data can be its greatest asset—and being able to derive real insights from this data is the key to overcoming the challenges of optimizing the Transaction Moment (as described above) and achieving relevance. Rokt’s AI-powered platform enables companies to create the type of tailored, personalized experience that resonates with customers and keeps them coming back. Recent data confirms this point, finding that a majority (75%) of customers “would shop the same amount or more with companies leveraging first-party data to ensure a more relevant experience.”

Learn more about how retailer Macy’s deployed Rokt’s AI and machine learning capabilities to provide more personalized, relevant customer experiences—and generate additional revenue.

Improve your post-purchase marketing with Rokt

The Rokt Ecommerce platform is designed to help companies optimize their post-purchase processes in order to maximize the value of every transaction by leveraging AI, machine learning, and first-party data. Using the Rokt platform makes it easier for ecommerce companies to promote tailored upsells and post-purchase offers that are more likely to convert. With Rokt, you can:

Unlock the moment that matters most: The Transaction Moment provides an unparalleled opportunity to inspire positive post-purchase behavior from each customer. That’s because as customers work to finalize their transaction, they are already in the buying mindset and, by extension, have a favorable view of the value your products or services provide.

Increase value per transaction: By connecting at the right moment, providing a relevant experience, and leveraging technology and data to serve up the right ancillary offers, companies can not only increase the value of each transaction, but the lifetime value of each customer, as well.

Overcome the paradox of choice: The paradox of choice isn’t as difficult to overcome as you might think—if you simply understand that a positive customer experience includes reducing an overload of choice and suppressing offers that aren’t relevant. It all comes down to making the best offer at the best time for the best customer.

Make incremental revenue: Unlock new revenue streams from advertisers that you feature on your confirmation pages. When ecommerce companies are able to access first-party data and AI through a platform like Rokt, they’re able to not only provide relevance to customers during the Transaction Moment (improving their overall experience) but also unlock a new stream of ancillary revenue. Newegg, for example, was able to uncover a new incremental revenue stream without compromising customer experience.

Rokt provides a trusted platform and scaled network that help companies provide relevant offers across the entire Transaction Moment, creating a more relevant customer experience from cart to confirmation while generating additional revenue for the business.

Rokt: Trusted by 17,600 companies (and counting)

To learn more about how Rokt has helped companies across a wide range of industries use AI and first-party data to optimize the Transaction Moment and unlock additional revenue, visit Rokt Ecommerce or talk to an expert.