What Is a Post-Purchase Evaluation Example?
In ecommerce, building productive customer relationships is just as important as providing a high-quality product or service. Today’s customers have access to more brands—and more information about those brands—than ever before, with the customer experience often identified as among the biggest competitive differentiators for these companies.
Effective post-purchase marketing provides a way for companies to build additional value for customers and increase ancillary revenue, and there’s often a correlation between successful ecommerce companies and innovative post-purchase experience examples.
As companies get serious about optimizing their buyer’s journey, they can gain valuable insights through post-purchase evaluation, which can take multiple forms. For example, some companies might directly solicit post-purchase evaluation in the form of a customer satisfaction survey, while others might encourage customers to leave online reviews or testimonials about their experience. Others, yet, might employ a combination of strategies.
This article will explore the importance of the post-purchase experience, what happens during the post-purchase evaluation stage, and how companies can use Rokt to build customer loyalty and increase revenue by promoting the best post-purchase offers at the best time in the buyer’s journey.
Why is the post-purchase experience important?
Today’s customers have more options than ever, especially when you consider the global reach of ecommerce. They’re also empowered by access to more information than ever—about products and services, as well as the brands behind them—which they use to evaluate not only the value of what you’re offering but also the experience you provide.
To put it simply, creating a positive post-purchase experience for customers can be the x-factor in developing a loyal customer base, as opposed to a series of one-time transactions.
What is an example of the post-purchase process?
Within an ecommerce transaction, the post-purchase process begins just after payment, and takes place across the thank you and confirmation screens. Together with the preceding stages—the cart and payment pages—these make up what we call the Transaction Moment™. During this portion of the customer journey, customers are highly focused on making a purchase—and, as such, most likely receptive to additional offers that add value to their transaction or increase their level of trust with the brand.
It’s no secret: customers prefer to do business with companies that understand their expectations, priorities, and challenges—making relevance the X-factor in creating a positive post-purchase process.
From cart through confirmation, each post-purchase touchpoint provides brands with an opportunity to demonstrate how well they understand their customers and prize their business—increasing the chance of converting their transaction into repeat business with the brand.
The same post-purchase touchpoints also enable ecommerce companies to generate additional, ancillary revenue. For example…
- When customers have items in their cart, brands can promote additional products or services related to the initial purchase, leading to up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Next, payment pages can be monetized by introducing customers to alternative payment providers or models for payment.
- Even thank you pages provide opportunities to promote complementary products, services, or offers through cross-selling and up-selling.
- Finally, the order confirmation screen represents an additional opportunity to provide customer value by promoting additional related offers or relevant third-party (non-endemic) offers.
What is a post-purchase evaluation?
Post-purchase evaluation is the process by which customers assess a recent purchase, considering factors like how well the product or service meets their expectations and how easy or difficult it was to do business with the company.
In addition to direct forms of post-purchase evaluation, like customer surveys, customers’ post-purchase behavior can also be indicative of how they feel. For example, satisfied customers might share something on social media or sign up for a loyalty program with the brand. Unsatisfied customers, by contrast, might leave negative reviews or initiate a refund process.
What is the post-purchase evaluation process?
There is no formalized post-purchase evaluation process in ecommerce—instead, it’s up to individual companies to find ways to engage customers, build trust, and inspire positive post-purchase behavior. By taking proactive steps to engage customers during the post-purchase process, they can build better customer relationships and develop loyalty over time.
What is an example of a post-purchase evaluation?
Arguably the most straightforward and popular form of post-purchase evaluation, surveys enable companies to ask direct questions and receive simple responses. Post-purchase surveys can help companies identify areas where they might be able to better meet expectations in the future.
Beyond simple surveys, companies can also solicit post-purchase evaluation from customers by asking them to write an online review or testimonial. By providing their feedback in the form of a narrative, positive written reviews can be a powerful tool for generating new business. Depending on the type of insights you’re after, you can develop post-purchase surveys that touch on different aspects of the ecommerce buying journey, from the awareness and consideration stages all the way through post-purchase.
What factors impact customers’ post-purchase evaluation?
Just as a wide range of nuanced factors impact virtually every aspect of human behavior, different customers will evaluate your brand differently based on their own past experiences and current priorities.
If you’re considering ways to increase customer engagement and improve post-purchase evaluation results, it’s important to keep in mind that when customers evaluate their transactions, they’re not just evaluating how much value their purchase is likely to provide. They’re also evaluating the buying process itself and how easy or difficult it was to do business with your brand.
That means that even if you’ve built a seemingly strong relationship with a customer, any touchpoint can potentially strengthen that connection. The opposite, of course, can be true as well.
We can explore this further through an example. Let’s say you’ve decided to focus on optimizing what the post-purchase process looks like for your customers. You know you want to start promoting additional products, services, or offers on the order confirmation page of your website or app. You know that by doing so, you can unlock substantial value for your brand as well as its customers. Now, consider the two ways most brands approach this:
- Some brands think the more offers you provide, the more likely a customer is to take advantage of at least one of them. Unfortunately, the paradox of choice is real. When faced with too many choices, many customers ultimately select none or regret the choice they made.
- Other brands recognize that success comes not just from promoting post-purchase offers, but from promoting the best offers at the best time. By offering tailored recommendations—upsells, cross-sells, third-party products and services, or simply no ad at all—companies can demonstrate to customers that they understand them and value their business.
Ultimately, the key to the kind of buying experience that drives productive post-purchase behavior is relevance—in other words, offering tailored recommendations for each customer on a 1:1 level. This, of course, begs the question: how do you know what additional offers each customer might recognize value in? That’s where Rokt’s platform comes into play. With Rokt, you can understand your customers better through your own first-party data and use AI to predict which offers are most likely to resonate with each customer.
See Rokt’s ecommerce platform in action
Rokt’s platform has been uniquely designed to improve post-purchase outcomes for ecommerce companies. Our platform empowers you to leverage award-winning machine learning to hyper-personalize the post-purchase process and connect customers with relevant products, services, and experiences they love.
With Rokt, you can experience something that’s rare in business: a win-win, in which ecommerce companies can unlock a source of additional, incremental revenue while making customers feel more understood and strongly connected with your brand. To learn more, reach out to our expert team or visit Rokt Ecommerce today.