What is post-purchase marketing and why is it important?
Grow your marketing with post-purchase strategies.
Most marketing efforts focus on how to acquire potential new customers and convert them to purchasing clients. Lately, more businesses have been focusing on post-purchase behavior – understanding how customers act after committing to a purchase and after the company has made the sale. Studying the customer through post-purchase evaluation helps businesses understand how to keep these customers coming back and increase repeat and referral business. Here are some effective post-purchase marketing strategies to explore for your B2B business.
Remember the Sales Cycle
Traditionally, the sales cycle for B2B organizations is longer than that of B2C businesses. Some businesses have stacks of paperwork and red tape to get through before they can send in their purchase order, while others only buy once a year based on their budget. It’s important, then to build these cycles into your marketing campaigns. If you know that a huge part of your business is selling to government agencies that have a hard stop for their fiscal year budget and need to spend the surplus before the year resets, part of your marketing strategy should be to target the agencies you’ve worked with before who have already purchased with you and encourage them to purchase again to spend those funds. Knowing your audience – and their business model – is important to growing the success of your business.
Send out Surveys
One of the best ways to gain repeat or referral business is to start by ensuring you have a strong relationship with your customer. Customers are more likely to be loyal to an organization they feel strong ties with or have a good rapport with. One of the best ways to improve your customer relationship is to listen to their feedback. Post-purchase customer experience surveys can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team, your marketing, and your outreach, and proactively make improvements to help bring customer satisfaction up.
Don’t Forget to Follow Up
Marketing automation is just as effective for B2B as it is for B2C, and post-purchase emails should be a part of your marketing campaign. This gives you the opportunity to keep connecting with customers even after a sale is closed and ensure that they know the lines of communication are open and that they should think of you for any further needs. Some post-sale emails could include content on:
- How to use your product
- What other products to pair with your purchase
- Solicit product or customer experience feedback
- Thank them for their purchase
Choose one kind of follow-up post-purchase or create a whole series to send to customers and keep engagement up.
Post-purchase marketing is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. You don’t have to close the communication loop just because you’ve closed the sale. Make sure customers know how to contact you and that you value their feedback to help improve your business and enhance their experience. Making sure they know that you’re not just about making sales but about building relationships will help make sure that they think of you in the future.
