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The One Cro Blindspot of Online Businesses

The One Cro Blindspot of Online Businesses


If you’ve been doing online marketing long enough you should understand by now the importance of conversion rate optimization (CRO), and how improving a key metric like conversion rate- even in small percentages- can have a major impact on your business’s bottom line.

Any business, no matter what its structure or business model is, needs to acquire new customers and optimize the acquisition funnel as much as possible. We all know this as common sense, and there is endless information about it across the web.

But what happens after you’ve acquired a new customer? Does the road end there? No, this is just the beginning- now you have to maintain a good relationship with your customer in order to retain him and make sure he comes back for more.

Returning customers are 3-12 times more profitable than new ones, but without the right strategy, they are very hard to maintain.

So, where does the acquisition process end and the retention process start? When the customer makes his second purchase? When the customer gets his product? In the order confirmation email?

Way before that- the retention process starts as soon as the customer completes his first order, in the order confirmation page AKA – the thank you page.

If you continue reading through this article, you will find that this one overlooked page can become your judgment day weapon when it comes to retention.

Segmentation

A key nut to crack in order to make the most out of your retention efforts is your customer segmentation- the deeper, the better.

The more details you have about your customers, the better your relationship with them can be. Your offer can be more relevant to the customer, and you will be able to engage him with more offers on more occasions.

Your thank you page is a great tool to better segment your audience,unlike emails, 100% of your customers see this page, at least once.

You can either segment your customers based on certain actions done on the thank you page, like clicking on a recommended product, or actually ask him for more information about himself. In this article, we’ll talk about the more direct approach of asking the customer for the information

Birthday

Use your thank you page to ask for a customer’s birthday, and let him know that it will be worth his while, and he will get a special birthday gift/deal.

Most businesses focus on retaining customers for the first 30-90 days after their first purchase,birthdays let you break this rule and connect with your customers at least once a year on their most personal and fun day. Not only that, birthday emails perform better than other emails, 4.8 times better to be precise.

Even better, you can offer your customers to set up birthday reminders for their loved ones, and send them a gift card or discount when each of those arrive, making it easy for your customers to decide what birthday gift to get the people in their lives.

birthday collector

Survey

This is where you can really go nuts on segmentation- you can add a simple, post-purchase survey, asking whatever you want, and segment your customers according to their answers.

Some good examples will be to ask your customers for their gender, ask how they heard about you, ask them what type of content or offers they’d like to see from you in the future, etc…

Most businesses use emails to conduct surveys. In order to fill those, the customer has to open the email, click it, get redirected to a different page and wait for it to load, and only then can he fill out the form. This process results in a very low response rate- external surveys response rate is 10-15% while internal surveys response rate is 30-40%.

The secret to success with surveys is to act according to the results, you can literally ask the customers what they want, all you have to do next is to give it to them. They will be happy and you will make an extra income.

During our work with over 1000 Shopify stores at ReConvert – Shopify thank you page builder, we’ve learned that a post-purchase survey submit rate on the thank you page is around43%. These numbers will beat any email or external survey.

Upsell

This is probably the most obvious and overlooked addition that is missing in almost every E-commerce store we come across. The fact that your customer just completed a purchase doesn’t mean that he is not likely to buy again from you, it means exactly the opposite!

The customer is “Hot” and holding his credit card in hand, he already made his decision to purchase from you, and already trusts you. Make sure this opportunity doesn’t go to waste- take advantage of this key point in a customer’s journey to squeeze the most out of the interaction in terms of revenue.

Product Recommendations

Display product recommendations on the order confirmation page to cross-sell your customers, and try to make these recommendations dynamic and fit whatever the customer just bought.

If you look at all the big stores – Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Aliexpress, you can see that all of them have a big section of recommended products on their thank you page. These giants spend millions on conversion rate optimization every year, if they all do it, they probably know what they’re doing.

ebay product recommendations

Time-Sensitive Offers

Make urgency a player on your thank you page by displaying a time sensitive offer (with a timer if possible)- you can make an offer to the customer that he can’t refuse, and get him to repurchase right then and there.

Since your customer completed two orders back to back, you can save on shipping fees, and ship both order together, which will allow you to offer a larger, more tempting, discount.

Some people would say that time-sensitive offers and timers are not effective in increasing conversions, but the numbers suggest otherwise- the average conversion rate on a popup with a time-sensitive offer on the order confirmation page is almost 3%! That’s impressive, considering that without it the conversion rate is 0.

Grow your lists

When it comes to retention, you must utilize your distribution lists. These are the online assets that will help you keep in touch with your customers.

By default, most checkout processors online capture customers’ emails while completing a purchase. While it is pretty good, and email marketing isn’t going anywhere in the near future,  not all customers respond to or even open any promotional emails.

But there is more to it- only using emails to retain customers is like riding a donkey on the highway, it’s just not fast enough, not good enough.

Social following/sharing

In the past few years, with the explosion of social media, online presence is one of a brand’s most important online assets, along with it’s  followers count (assuming these are well targeted, high-quality followers).

On your order confirmation page, you can make it as simple for the customer as a click of a button to follow you or share his order on different social media platforms. Again, if Amazon are doing it, there is a good chance you should too.

You can always enhance the results by adding a coupon for the customer to share with his friends, or get a chance to win something cool.

amazon thank you page

Alternative lists

As mentioned before, different people respond to different triggers- some customers will respond best to emails, some will respond to SMS, web push notifications or even print mail.

This is why you should aim to collect your customers to distribution lists on all of these mediums.

The thank you page is a great way to get them to opt-in to different channels- you can offer either a special discount, shipping updates or free content. Just try and see what works for your audience.

Messenger bots, for example, are very effective these days. It’s not a secret that open and click through rates on messenger are way higher than emails, and can go up to 89% open rate and 56% click rate.

You can offer your customers to get shipping updates directly to their Facebook Messenger and stay up to date with deals and new releases.

The numbers are the same with web push notifications, with click rates around 10% and same number for optin rate- so not using this channel for your business is flat out losing money.

Lastly, I won’t bore  you any longer with open rates and statistics, this time about SMS– but again, this is a great channel to utilize.

The bottom line is: email, while still a very powerful retention tool, has the lowest performance data among these “secondary” lists & assets, yet everyone are focusing on that medium alone. Use this key micro-moment with your customer to ask him to subscribe to more channels.

email vs sms vs push notifications

Conclusion

There are a lot of other things you can do with your thank you page – you can add a personal message from the founder to the customer, add a thank you video, be proactive with your customer service with frequently asked questions, track orders and more, Just make sure it fits your business model and needs.

No matter what you are selling and who you’re selling to, if you don’t optimize your thank you page, you’re literally leaving money on the table.

With relatively easy customization, you can unlock the power of this page and boost your retention efforts, while providing an outstanding customer experience.

You can either pay a developer to make the customizations you’re looking for, or use a built-in tool, but do not ignore this page. We’ve seen thank you pages converting from 0 to 7.69%, ask yourself where you are on this range and decide if this is something you’re willing to ignore.

Served 3 years in the IDF as a Tank Commander. Own a 7 figure eCommerce business. Shopify app freak who spent over 3 years in the Shopify ecosystem. Co-founded StilyoApps - Shopify apps that help you sell more.