Drive and Convert (Ep. 102): Why You Shouldn’t Neglect the Post-Purchase Phase – Behind the Click Deep Dive

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About This Episode:

The digital journey doesn’t end at the checkout.

Jon and Ryan discuss the importance of post-purchase optimization and the impact it has on growing an online brand. They share real-life examples and explain how to handle customer feedback, utilizing psychological principles and the significance of the post-purchase phase in driving future orders.

Jon also offers a glimpse into his upcoming book, Behind The Click. 

GET FIRST CHAPTER FREE AT: thegood.com/BTC

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why the post-purchase is an important part of the customer journey
2. How to utilize customer reviews for improvement
3. How the onboarding process can make or break the digital experience
4. How to respond to negative reviews
5. How the post-purchase experience impacts future orders 

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Garrow:
Hi Jon. Good to see you here. Big week for Mr. McDonald and The Good. You are publishing your third book. We’ve talked about it a little bit, Behind the Click, never ending evolution of conversion rate optimization and what you should or could be doing. As we’ve all gotten the taste of this book and read some chapters, one of the most popular topics consistently that we’ve come across on this is post-purchase optimization and conversions that happen after the purchase. It is such a big piece of growing an online brand that I’m excited to pick your brain and go deeper on this particular chapter because I honestly believe it’s one of the more overlooked pieces of optimization in general. I mean, people are always good about, well, not always good, but optimizing traffic to the site is fairly well known, accepted, optimizing until you get the conversion, fairly well known and accepted. Most people know that you’ve got to use email on loyalty to build something after, but it’s like between conversion and all of that email stuff, there’s so much opportunity.

Jon:
Oh, so much.

Garrow:
I mean if you listen to this podcast regularly, you’ve probably heard us touch on it, but I’m going to tell you right now without even hearing all of Jon’s points, this is going to be one of the more valuable podcasts you listen to about just conversion optimization in general.

Jon:
Wow, way to set me up for success there.

Garrow:
Oh man, you’re guaranteed. It’s like layups for Jon. He’s super tall, he can dunk, and he’s just going to lay this up. It’s going to be easy, so we’re going to dive into one now. Each chapter in your book, by the way, is a different part of that journey into conversion and where it goes, and so this is one of your later chapters and we’re going to discuss this post-purchase. I mean, I’m excited about post-purchase. I don’t know, if it hasn’t come across on this, in my intro yet, I am always excited about post-purchase. I get amped up about it.

Jon:
For an ads guy that says a lot.

Garrow:
It is. It’s a big deal, man. If I could optimize that, your business could grow so much quicker, but it’s unexpected for most people, so an entire chapter might for most people seem overkill. For you though, why did you decide that it needed an entire chapter in this book?

Jon:
Yeah, that’s a great question and I think beyond all the wonderful things you’ve just said about post-purchase, which are all true, I think the key is that conversions just don’t stop at the checkout. So many people think that I’m going to optimize my traffic. I’m going to optimize getting them to check out. But after that, they typically stop because they think, oh, I’ve hit the goal. I’ve won. But the big challenge here is that you’ve likely ushered your customers along towards making that right decision and doing that as easily and efficiently as possible. But the problem is that what you haven’t done is really meet all their expectations yet. You’ve led them to a successful checkout. They get a purchase confirmation in their email, but their expectations are not ending there. That’s really why it was important because when we start talking about all these psychological principles, which are the foundation of this book and Behind the Click, what we really found was that there are a ton of these cognitive shortcuts people are taking after they purchase.
You’ve heard of buyer’s remorse. Right? You start thinking about, oh, how do I combat that? Because now you got the conversion, but you want return rate to drop. You want your customer service to have a better experience or have less interaction, the need for less interactions. That post-purchase experience can either validate or really trigger regret. You really want to understand that the last impression a customer has of your company is the one that’s going to stick, and so this matters immensely. If you do it right, you get repeat customers.

Garrow:
Oh, yeah. I totally agree. You want more of that. But my post-purchase regret is every time my wife buys something on Amazon. How do you handle my purchase regret? If you could solve for that …

Jon:
I believe that’s called couples therapy, and I hear it works quite well. There’s also, you could pull the trick of closing down a credit card or two. That always works too. Just cut it off at the head.

Garrow:
Bite me harder than it would. But no, I want to hear more about that, the post-purchase regret. Most people I’m talking to daily, business owners talking about conversions and optimizing, psychology has never entered our conversation around that. A very much an overlooked piece of all of this, I believe.

Jon:
Well, that’s exactly why I wrote this book to begin with because of that issue that people aren’t talking about what’s behind all of this. I think we could break this down a little more though. If we think about the customer sentiment referring to the emotions your customers feel towards your company, the products or the services that you’re offering. If your customers have a positive sentiment, they’re more likely to buy and become repeat customers. Those who think of your company more negatively are less likely to buy or repeat. Pretty high level, pretty simple. But if we’re breaking that down to a psychological level, to formulate those opinions, customers are going to ask themselves two questions. Were my expectations met and would I make this decision again or recommend that a friend do the same? That’s where social proof often comes in. A lot of companies are out there helping you get social proof, but very few brands are thinking about were are the customer’s expectations met and how can I make sure that happens?

Garrow:
Yeah, and I think a lot of them boil it down like, will people recommend their friends if I give them loyalty points. Like, well, maybe, but does that actually mean that their expectations were met?

Jon:
Right? Yeah. Loyalty points aren’t worth anything if the expectations aren’t met, right, because they’re never going to use them.

Garrow:
Okay, so I mean, let’s go deeper, which we usually try to do every time. The first piece of that were how do you make sure that the buyer’s expectations were met going through that process? I mean, they bought it, so my default would be like, you bought it. Congratulations. I did my job.

Jon:
Well and you did half your job. Right? I mean, that’s the reality as a brand. You got the product to the consumer. Now you want that repeat customer. You want that better lifetime value. Really if you got them to the point of purchase, you’ve made a bunch of promises along the way. Whether those were explicit or inherit, you basically have told based on your brand story, on even the user experience of your website. It’s a horrible user experience. I’m going to assume that the product is cheap and a horrible experience. If it feels very high end and I’m buying something on Apple’s website where it just feels like it’s meant to cost more money and be a nicer experience, then I’m likely going to have the expectation that when my computer or phone or whatever I buy from them arrives, it’s going to be of better quality.
Now is really the time for the brand to follow through. They’ve made these promises pre-purchase, the conversion has happened, now you need to follow through. The solution for that is really pretty simple. It’s to be proactive with your communication as a brand on the good and the bad. There’s ways to look at this, but I’ll start off by saying that if you’ve ever had the urge to delete a negative review, don’t. Just stop there. You can actually be proactive about this. The fact that the consumer is left a review shows that there’s opportunity for improvement so be proactive about that. Find the silver lining here that they’re at least talking to you. They’re at least telling you. That means that you’ve set a good expectation that wasn’t met that you now can correct. You can do that not only for the consumer who left the review, but you could do it for all future ones to prevent more of those from happening.
They’re telling you what you need to do, even if somebody leaves a negative or neutral review. We’ve done lots of research on this at The Good, there’s a ton of studies, consumers in the end end up tending to feel more favorable towards the company just by leaving the review. It’s like some type of outlet for their anger, but they feel better and they feel like they’ve contributed to the company. They feel like, I’m giving you my feedback, and if you correct it or acknowledge it, a lot of that negativity goes away. When a negative review comes in, and let’s face it, even the most successful companies get them. Right? No one is perfect. A lot of things are out of your hands, delivery. Maybe the UPS guy, not to pick on UPS, maybe they threw the box. The delivery guy threw the box and it ruins something. Right? It’s not your fault, but you’re going to get the end result of that.
If you can see these as an opportunity not an obstacle, what you should do is first learn from them, we talked about that, but then respond appropriately. When I say appropriately, what I mean by that is what can you learn from it? Don’t attack them publicly. Don’t say you’re wrong publicly. Instead, empathize. We hear you. We know that this was an issue. Here’s how you get ahold of us. Let’s fix it. Then when you get positive reviews, respond with gratitude. Don’t just leave them hanging. Let them know you heard them, you appreciate it and respond. You really want to try to respond to every review. We worked with a clothing company, I’ll call them, right, high level clothing company. We basically heard from customer reviews that there was a lot of misunderstanding around fit for the clothing. What happened was we ran a test that added a size and scale fit to the site. Think of it as a straight line with some points on that line that would say fits, true to size, and fits, it was in the middle, it fits smaller and larger were on the two ends.
As a consumer, you could look at that and say, oh, it fits a little smaller or a lot smaller than what typical sizing would be. We added that to the product detail pages and had the company go in and adjust based on all the reviews. What we found was really quickly it was a winner. Based on a lift and per session value, it equated to $276,000 a year in additional revenue.

Garrow:
Dang.

Jon:
One little thing of adjusting how people perceive the fit solved a lot of problems. Now that’s not even accounting for less returns, less customer service, less exchanges, all which cost the company money. This could have been a million dollar test winner here. Using reviews to help customers gain confidence in the size and fit of their purchase improves that user experience, increase transactions, and basically everybody wins, which is really the goal.

Garrow:
I guess if you’re not collecting reviews, you’d better be because …

Jon:
You got to start there.

Garrow:
… you can’t get this piece of that feedback if you’re not collecting reviews and make sure they can submit them to Google. Not every review company can do that, so important point there, but accept that. I mean, we’ve all had those clients in our industry that want to debate the validity of their products online, and you can watch it happen. You’re just train wrecking it.

Jon:
Yes, that’s a great example.

Garrow:
And it stays forever. Isn’t that great. The Better Business Bureau ones are my favorite. Those don’t ever leave. But I think that yes, get that feedback. Then isn’t there things you can do? Even post review I’ve heard of things in the delivery system, capturing feedback, even if it’s not online. There’s so many ways you can collect that feedback. Just get it, and it’s going to be so valuable to you as you see how you’ve met their expectation there. Now it’s, next question they’re going to ask themselves, did this product or service work as it should? The purchase experience immediately, yes, but then it’s like, hey, how did it do what I thought it was going to do?

Jon:
Right. Yeah, and that’s exactly it. In that post-purchase phase, you’re no longer guiding them towards a purchase. You’re ensuring that they continue to feel confident in that purchase that they already made. What you’re doing here is trying to avoid that regret. Right? Oh, the product arrives. It’s not what I thought it was. Oh, this feels cheaper than what I thought it was, or man, this is really complicated to use and I have no idea where to start. Really at this stage, the only good surprise after a customer purchases is that the product is even better than they expected. That’s the only surprise that is a positive. Every other surprise is just outright negative for the consumer. I don’t know. I mean, maybe the surprise of it showing up early could be a positive, but even then, if they were planning to be home the day that it arrived. I mean, I had a really expensive couple thousand dollars camera that I had ordered, and I wanted to be home because I didn’t want to sitting around all day, and it showed up a couple of days early.
Normally people would be like, yeah. But I was like, I wasn’t home for two days. I was out of town. I was on the road and the camera just kind of sat there. It was wet and cold, and I was like, oh, this is not good. Someone could take it or just get ruined, so that ended up being kind of a more stressful experience for me. But the product was great in the end. The solution here is I think it’s to have a clear and easy onboarding process. What I mean by that is if you want to live up to every promise that you’ve made, but that customer has no idea how to access that information, how to use the product, or doesn’t even know if it has features on it, or they believe there’s features that don’t exist, I mean there’s any confusion there, you really need to clear that up immediately.
That’s where an onboarding process really becomes crucial. I say onboarding, it’s usually a term used in SaaS, software as a service, but it also can be done for products in e-commerce. Most of these onboarding experiences are where you’re going to really make or break a product. If you get it right, you’re going to have increased usage. You’re going to have higher retention. You’ll see a long-term customer satisfaction. There’s just a laundry list of things that can happen from this. You increase retention because they’re going to immediately understand the value of your product, start using it, getting value out of it. That’s going to help them retain. You’re going to increase customer satisfaction. You’re going to reduce friction and confusion. That’s going to help you have less customer service inquiries. Right? That’s going to cut down costs. Probably a lower return rate would even happen, which is great.
Of course, you’re going to increase conversion rates by converting maybe those free trial users into paying customers. One of our biggest clients at The Good has us come in and optimize that conversion from a free trial to a paid user. That is all we focus on with them. It’s not about just getting them to convert from that free trial. It’s about setting the proper expectations, having the right onboarding experience, and what expectations have been set. How do we meet those and what actions do consumers take who convert so that we can look at that data and say we should influence those behaviors. Proving product feedback, you can gain insight into how people interact with your product. I mean, all of these things are just really great to come out of this.
There’s a handful of things you should do in onboarding, and then we can move on from this. But I would say that an excellent onboarding process does these five things really, really well. They put the user first. They promote user action, so getting somebody to take an action right away. They push value. Did you know that you also can do this with the tool? Most people don’t know that. They collect feedback. If you have any feedback or concerns, here’s how you can get ahold of us really easily. Then they take it slowly. They’re not trying to basically fire hose the user or new product owner with all this information that they’re not going to retain. Instead, they step it out. They say, oh, well, the first step is just plug this camera in and then we’ll guide you from there. Then once you plug the camera in, it picks it up and starts walking you through how to install the software.
You can even start with the packaging. There’s a lot of ways to do that. You can have consumers choose their own adventure. You can do personalization quizzes. Before they buy a product or right after they buy it, you could say, okay, how often do you use this product? We’ll make sure, we will notify you when your toothbrush needs a new toothbrush head. Right? You can create checklists. Okay, go through these steps and you’ll be a pro. You can take customers on a tour, do a guided tour for them. Get them started with templates. If it’s something that is a complicated process, maybe give them some sample data in your software tool, or if it’s something that they purchased, maybe guide them through creating that first photo or video with the camera. One of my favorites is interactive walkthroughs. There’s a lot of really great tools out there for software now to help you do that.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Garrow:
Too many companies, I think, take the easy button on these next steps. My favorite is when I go to Target and I get my $15 mini waffle maker for my kids, and it’s like their first step is register your product. It falls out of the box. I’m not going to go register my $15 mini waffle maker because number one, I’d have to go to a website and put information in I don’t want to, but that’s likely not. I think you have to really think through who your customer is and what are their goals. Most people aren’t going to care when your $15 waffle maker breaks in a few months. You only paid $15 for it. Be creative, and you’re probably going to have to, I’m guessing you’re going to advise people to test and measure some things. Like maybe there’s an AB test you run with half your boxes get this, half your boxes get this, and see which one does better.

Jon:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think if we’re talking about the psychology of consumers, there’s a ton of principles at play here and a lot of ways for brands to measure success. You can test for recency effect. Consumers, this is really the idea that consumers are most likely to remember the last thing that we saw, so you could test this during the onboarding phase. Right? Like, oh, what caused you to buy this? What was the number one feature you were most excited about? Now you know and you can put that back into testing that language and that feature on your PDP because you now have that information, and it can guide your onboarding, helping them do that functionality or feature first. There’s one called the fundamental attribution error. This is an interesting one because when we’re forming opinions, people tend to give excessive weight to personal traits while minimizing the impact of the surrounding circumstances.
What I mean by that is as a consumer I am giving a lot of weight to how I feel about the company I’m buying from, the traits of that company. Less about how I’m to use that product. That’s really why a lot of people focus on the founders of a brand. They’re trying to tell the story because they want people to feel like they’re friendly, and then they start thinking, oh, okay, their products are probably friendly too. They start attributing these things in error, which is why that has that name. Then the last is the observer expectancy effect, and this is the fact that people’s behavior can change when they’re aware they’re being observed. The last thing you want to do in an onboarding phase is kind of hover as a brand.
There’s a lot you’ve seen coming, these Shopify app providers come and go. There’s some that were like, we’ll do live onboarding with your customers and we’ll do video and we’ll help people get set up. They never last because nobody wants to be watched. They don’t want to be observed. They just want to be told what to do or how to get the most out of a product. Really, that could be beneficial for somebody who’s maybe super unfamiliar with the technology, but it certainly isn’t going to hit the mass of your customer base. Those are the three kind of psychological effects at play here that I would really consider.

Garrow:
Yeah. Okay. I guess in summary, we have to think through the digital journey. Once you get them checked out, you’re still on a digital journey. The product may arrive, but there’s a big process there that should happen digitally interacting with your customers somehow. Then as you’re selling physical goods, you’re generally not thinking through a SaaS system. But those companies are phenomenal at the onboarding process. Even now I’m thinking to my past companies and where we really failed at that onboarding process and helping customers do it. Even now, even companies I’m involved in now, we all need to probably work on our onboarding process.

Jon:
At The Good it’s something we sell a service, so there’s no tangible physical product we’re handing over, but we spend a lot of effort in onboarding, making sure everybody knows what’s happening, what’s coming up next, and how they can contribute. We have spent so much time mapping out what that entire onboarding process looks like that a lot of people say that that’s one of the most enjoyable times of working with us because there’s been so much effort put into it.

Garrow:
Yeah. Why does that not surprise me that Jon has spent a bunch of time doing that at his company? Outside of The Good, all of us probably need to really investigate our onboarding process.

Jon:
There’s always room for improvement, Ryan. Right?

Garrow:
Always room. But think like a SaaS company. I like your analogy of the clients you’ve worked with in SaaS that give away a free product and have to upgrade to a paid trial. It’s easy to sign up for something free. I haven’t paid you anything, but if you want to get me to spend money, you have to get me interacting with that product, and you have to have a good experience that’s going to be worth more than you’re asking me to pay or I’m probably not going to pay for it. Think about it the same way as a physical goods, I’m assuming where I’m giving you something you paid $50 for. I need you to feel like it was worth $75 to a hundred dollars after my onboarding process with you, because that makes my email loyalty dramatically more. Customer concerns are the ugly beast none of us want to address or think about, but you’re going to have unhappy customers if you’re selling online. Guaranteed.

Jon:
It’s going to happen. Yeah, you might as well respond in a positive light, show others that you care, have empathy, and you will be in a really good spot.

Garrow:
You have to have been the one that told me this, but there’s a, negative reviews end up becoming more powerful than positive reviews to the consumer that hasn’t bought yet when you respond and engage.

Jon:
Yes, a hundred percent. We could do a whole episode on that, so I won’t take too much time now, but I’ll just say that is because consumers trust negative reviews more than they do positive because they know so many brands have cheated along the years and paid people for positive reviews or have influencers leaving reviews, et cetera. Really, if you’re looking for how a brand is going to treat their customers, then you’re looking at the negative reviews. That’s again why it’s super important to make sure that you’re combating potential regret because that consumer will look at those and keep in mind, after I buy this product, how am I going to be treated?

Garrow:
I believe from a psychology standpoint, we trust somebody that has a few bad reviews more than somebody that’s a hundred percent five star, because it shows you’re human and you’re fallible, but you fix it. Then finally, I think we have paying attention to these post-purchase things really does open the door to those future orders. If you’re failing at that between I guess purchase and your first email to them, you’ve got some struggles for future orders.

Jon:
Yes. I think that’s where a lot of folks leave money on the table because they worry about getting people in the door and then less so about what happens after they’ve converted. Here we can talk about it for a half hour. Right? There’s a lot you can do here.

Garrow:
I mean, it’s such a small window, but it has a massive impact, I think, if you’re really trying to grow and push a brand. Your book just came out this week, so if you haven’t got it, you guys need to go get it, and Jon is going to give you the first chapter free to just whet the appetite. It’s not going to be the chapter on post-purchase, I’m guessing?

Jon:
I don’t think so, but we’ll surprise you. How’s that? But go to thegood.com/btc, so BTC for Behind the Click. If you go there, you can download that first chapter and see what the outline of the entire book is about. You can buy it there. You can go to Amazon and get it there. It’s everywhere books are sold. Eventually we’ll have an audio version. Again, I got to figure out if I’m going to read it or not.

Garrow:
Or how much you’re going to pay me to read it.

Jon:
There we go. Got to get that Garrow radio voice going.

Garrow:
Thank you, Jon. I appreciate it. If you’ve listened, you’ve got to get this book and learn about your conversions, understand the psychology behind it, because you will be a better e-commerce brand for it.

Jon:
Awesome. Very kind of you. Thank you, Ryan.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.