9500155523
We Provide Endless Support! FREE SEO SCAN Request Quote
//repunext.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/1.jpg

How Can eCommerce Companies Leverage QR Codes to Enable Post-Purchase Customer Engagement

Most money customers spend on retail goods in 2022 will be through ecommerce purchases. The ecommerce market is forecasted to grow to $5.545 trillion in 2022 and up to an impressive $7.3 trillion by 2025.

While several factors are driving the rise in ecommerce sales, customer engagement is one of the main ones. Proper customer engagement leads to increased sales as buyers are willing to pay more just to get a better customer experience.

Customers are more likely to buy from brands that recognize and remember them through post-purchase engagements and other strategies. Post-purchase customer engagement is crucial for the success of all ecommerce companies.

Let us look at the importance of post-purchase for ecommerce, how to create customer engagement campaigns and how to leverage QR codes to ensure more effective post-purchase customer engagement.

Why is Post-Purchase Engagement Important for eCommerce Businesses?

Acquiring a new customer is up to 5x more expensive than retaining existing ones. Therefore, it makes better sense to try and keep as many of your existing customers as possible by providing the best possible post-purchase experience.

Post-purchase customer engagement is one of the best strategies to achieve this. Also, it comes with many other benefits, including the following 5:

1. Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities

Increasing the lifetime value of the customers with post-purchase engagements can lead to more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Upselling entails increasing the value customers get from your products and services by encouraging them to pay for add-ons or buy better and more expensive products. For example, if you sell kitchenware and a customer orders a set of knives, you can use post-purchase engagement to upsell them a complete kitchen set.

Cross-selling entails selling additional products to customers meant to complement their original purchase. For example, if you sell smartphones, you can cross-sell by encouraging customers to buy a phone case and other accessories like screen protectors.

Maintaining positive post-purchase customer engagement ensures you do not miss out on possible upsell and cross-sell opportunities as you will gather more info about the clients and identify their needs.

2. Creating Additional Customer Touchpoints for Engagements

Customer touchpoints are essential for marketing, sales, and business branding. And so, the more of them you have, the better they will be for your business.

Post-purchase customer engagement can help you create additional touchpoints. Every channel you use to engage the customer post-purchase is itself a new touchpoint that will be highly useful for your business.

For example, you get multiple ways of reaching out to the client if you are using a multi-channel approach for post-purchase engagement that includes email, social media, and QR codes. This way, it will be easier to convince them to buy from you again and recommend your products/services to their peers.

3. Improving Brand Loyalty

Customers value and trust brands that recognize and remember them, which is what post-purchase engagement is all about.

Engaging customers after purchase ensures they familiarize themselves with your brand and know you value them, which helps build brand loyalty and customer trust.

An excellent example is using post-purchase engagement to send happy birthday wishes to your customers since you already know their birthdate from your previous encounter. If you also give them a special birthday discount, they will value your brand more and are likely to buy again in the future as this improves their overall experience.

A solid post-purchase engagement strategy makes it visible to your customers that you are still available to help them out even after buying from you and not just looking for a one-off sale. It will also be easier for them to trust your brand as the post-purchase engagement signifies that you are a well-established business.

4. Obtaining Product Feedback

Customer feedback is crucial for the success of any business. If you do not know what customers feel about your products, it is hard to tell what you need to improve to give them the best and increase your sales and revenue. It is imperative to give importance to understanding post-purchase behavior to form the best post-purchase strategies.

You can also use post-purchase engagement to get customer reviews and improve referrals. Customer reviews and feedback provides much-needed social proof and can also be beneficial for improving your SEO.

5. Improving Overall Customer Experience

Customer experience post-purchase matters a lot. If you want customers to have the best experience interacting with your business, you should focus on their sales journey and what happens after the conversion.

By engaging customers post-purchase, you can quickly tell whether the products and services meet their needs and, if not, what you can do to improve their experience.

There are several ways to improve customer experience and enable post-purchase engagement. Post-purchase behavior will help you understand this in more detail and aid in improving your customer engagement strategies by offering easy returns and refunds. Remember that up to 30% of online purchases are returned, which does not necessarily mean that your products are of inferior quality.

Customers have different reasons for returning items and giving them an easy way to do it eliminates the fear of getting stuck with something they do not like. Besides improving your customer experience, this can also contribute to increased sales.

//repunext.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/2.jpg

How to Create Post-Purchase Customer Engagement Campaigns

Post-purchase customer engagement should be well-planned and executed for the best outcomes, just like any other marketing campaign. But, it should be pretty easy to set up and implement if you know what to do.

Here are the main steps to follow for a successful post-purchase engagement campaign:

Step 1: Understand Target Audience and Campaign Purpose

The first step in most marketing campaigns is to identify your target audience, given the diverse nature of customer preferences.

You also have to identify the specific purpose of the campaign. Keeping campaign purpose and goals clear makes it easy to track and measure its success.

When it comes to the target audience, it is essential to determine whether you want to engage with new customers, reengage old ones that have already bought from you, or improve customer engagement for existing customers.

For the campaign purposes, the most common ones for post-purchase customer engagement are running seasonal campaigns, upselling/cross-selling campaigns, and running campaigns to enhance customer loyalty.

Making your target audience and campaign purpose as straightforward as possible will make planning and implementation easier.

Step 2: Choose an Appropriate Channel

You have to choose an appropriate channel for running your campaign. Here the overall choice is between online and offline channels.

It is important to note that each has merits and demerits and will suit different campaign types and strategies. These merits and demerits make it a good idea to use an omni channel approach to ensure you do not miss out on the benefits of either channel.

For example, customers get immediate responses with offline channels since there is direct in-store interaction.

Although online channels lack personalization, given there is no human interaction, they provide a broader reach that allows you to engage many customers at a go. For example, you can send emails to countless people and engage many others via social media.

Step 3: Create Campaign Content

Once you choose your channel, you need to create content to engage the customers. What material do you want to use? Do you want to send emails requesting their feedback, or do you want to create social media posts tailored for customer engagement?

Ultimately the specific goals you have for the campaign will determine the right material to use. However, it is crucial to conduct proper market research to determine what content will work best for your post-purchase customer engagement.

Besides content, you also need to create the necessary collaterals for the campaign where applicable. Once this is done, you will be ready to launch the campaign.

Step 4: Measure and Optimize the Campaign

The last step is to measure the campaign's success and optimize it where necessary to ensure you reach your preset goals.

Measuring the campaign's success will only be possible if you have specific goals. For example, if your goal was to re engage your old customers, the number of new purchases from this group is a suitable parameter you can use to measure the campaign's success.

As you track and measure your post-purchase engagement campaign, it will be easy to notice any deficiencies that require changes to optimize the campaign's overall performance.

//repunext.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/3.jpg

How to Use QR Codes to Enable Post-Purchase Customer Engagement in eCommerce Companies?

Post-purchase engagement is essential for every business that wants to succeed, but only a few can do it correctly.

However, one of the easiest and most effective ways of post-purchase engagement is running an omnichannel campaign that utilizes contactless technologies such as QR codes. With easy-to-use QR code generators out there, it will be a hassle-free experience.

Here are some ideas for creating omnichannel customer engagement campaigns with QR codes:

1. Product Packaging 

Did you know that simply including a dynamic QR code on your product packaging can be a highly effective way of implementing post-purchase customer engagement.? These product packaging QR codes can serve multiples purposes, including the following:

  • Branded engagement campaigns – Having a QR code on product packaging provides an easy way to create a branded engagement campaign. But how? The QR code can direct the customers to a landing page with more information about your brand. They help in customer engagement by conveying your brand trends, coupon codes for discounts, or other interesting customer engagement activities.
  • QR codes for product information sharing – The QR codes on product packaging can also provide more information on the product, such as guides and instructions on using the product and other important information such as product source.
  • QR codes for product authentication – QR codes provide an easy way to check whether the product is authentic or not. By simply scanning the code, you can land on a page that provides all the information you need to determine the product's authenticity, such as the unique serial number and date of manufacture.
  • Using QR codes for obtaining product feedback – If you want to collect more information about the product, you can use QR codes to engage customers to solicit feedback or a review. This is crucial to shape the services you provide in favor of your customers for utmost customer satisfaction.

2. Direct Mail Campaigns

Direct mail campaigns are still one of the most effective marketing strategies with a high ROI and response rate. And it can also be an effective way of implementing your post-purchase customer engagement. Here are some examples of how to do it:

  • You can send some highly personalized direct mails for product advertising and promote seasonal campaigns to your customers. Also, you can include QR codes in the emails to direct them to your web to get more information on the campaign. This is a unique and creative way to get customers to engage with your business.
  • Direct mail is still a viable way of sharing loyalty program incentives, coupons, and gift hampers. It is always very convenient to receive physical coupons that you can use in brick and mortar stores via mail.
  • Direct mail can also be helpful when you need to engage customers post-purchase for upselling or cross-sell campaigns. Simply sending them a direct mail is enough to inform them of what better products you have to offer or what you think can complement their purchase.

3. Omnichannel Customer Engagement Through Retail Stores

It is still possible to run a successful omnichannel customer engagement using QR codes for those that have brick-and-mortar stores. Here are some ideas on how to do it.

  • Run in-store promotions using strategically placed QR codes. Also, you can use these QR codes to share product information to make shopping more convenient for customers.
  • Do customer engagement via QR codes in-store. Instead of images, texts, and other material, you can use QR codes to engage customers as the curiosity to know what it is all about will encourage more scanning.
  • You can use QR codes for lead generation from offline stores to your online marketing campaigns. Making the campaign the landing page for the QR code directs more people to your online marketing.
  • Use QR codes to drive brand awareness and improve the customer experience for an omnichannel customer experience.

Conclusion

Contactless marketing strategies used by marketers include QR codes as they are helpful for almost all aspects of your ecommerce business, from sales and marketing to soliciting customer feedback.

Besides leveraging QR codes, you also need to properly plan and execute your post-purchase customer engagement. This is easy as you only need to identify your goals, choose a channel to use, create campaign content, and track/optimize it after launch.

The bottom line is that every interaction with the customer matters for your ecommerce business. Therefore, besides post-purchase engagement, you should ensure that every interaction enhances the overall customer experience. This will help turn more customers into lifelong advocates for your brand.

Author Bio:

Akshay is a digital marketer and a startup enthusiast exploring the myriad avenues of everything marketing. At Beaconstac, he enables companies to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds through the use of custom QR codes.

https://repunext.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Author-300x300.png