Why post-shipping experience right time to engage with your customers

October 13, 2021

In a hyper-digital world, there’s an increased orientation towards studying consumer behaviour, expectations, and motivations to learn better about what goes into their purchase cycle. Across brands, one of the topmost wish list items is to get access to the secret of how to engage with the customer post-purchase. And one common misapprehension or false optimism among them, especially those in the e-commerce sector, is that their customers will make a purchase again without them putting any extra effort.

Sugam Jain of Shyplite is breaking down some of the important tips to deliver a great post-shipping experience that will benefit both customers and retailers.

When you look at some customer retention stats, the cost of acquiring new customers can be 5X more than retaining existing customers. The probability of an existing customer making a purchase is always 60-70 percent while that of a new customer is just 10-20 percent. This is because we are residing in an experience economy. For Indian consumers, experience is everything, and it drives their perception towards a brand. This makes it critical for brands to create an end-to-end customer experience built around trust, delight, and positive brand perception.

With online shopping at an all-time high and the emergence of new businesses online, the shipping experience significantly impacts both lead conversions and customer retention. Beyond what the e-commerce playbooks by Amazon or eBay convey from a ‘delivery speed’ and ‘customer experience’ standpoint, businesses need to overstep customer expectations to make their brand stand out amongst the competitors in today's era.

There are strong statistics that suggest that approximately 51 percent of customers will stop purchasing from a particular brand after just one bad delivery experience. Now add this with another data insight which suggests that buying decisions of 93 percent of customers are impacted by online reviews. To put it in simple words, a business doesn’t just get unsatisfied customers, it also ends up choking its sales funnel with apprehensive customers turning away from the cart. Hence, working towards creating a holistic supply chain by staying on top of queries, delays, failed deliveries, and lost or damaged shipments via increased real-time visibility for both customers and your support team is crucial for any business.

Delivering a great post-shipping experience has a gamut of benefits for both customers and retailers. Summarizing few tips that the businesses should follow:

• Keep customers well aware of their shipment’s status via SMS/email notifications, branded tracking pages and stay connected. Providing brand immersive tracking experiences leads to an amplified Customer Lifetime Value and the ROI.
• Meaningful engagement with real-time updates helps in building trust and developing customer loyalty. Tap the monetization opportunities on tracking moments with marketing assets like personalized product recommendations and offers.
• Include the faster shipping option and by storing inventory closer to the customers' businesses can easily make the same-day or next-day deliveries.
• If SMEs and entrepreneurs want to engage with customers successfully, they should take the advantage of their post-checkout experience: the shipping process. Logistics automation platforms have proved to be an enabler for businesses in managing multiple touchpoints (tracking pages, shipping labels, product packaging, inserts, etc) required for an ideal shipping process that engages users, fosters brand loyalty, and drives more business

Sugam Jain is the founder & CEO of Shyplite

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Indian Transport & Logistics News