In e-commerce, the secret to success often lies not in winning new customers, but above all in retaining and winning back existing customers. In this article, we show how you can use a second-purchase campaign to turn one-time buyers into repeat buyers, what makes this campaign work and how it solves your one-time buyer problem.

What makes a good second-purchase campaign?

A good second-purchase campaign is characterized above all by communicating an offer that is relevant to the customer at the right time. That sounds simple, but the importance of relevance cannot be emphasized strongly enough. For example, it makes little sense to offer customers products they have already bought or products that do not fit their profile, such as men’s shoes when the first purchase was women’s shoes. Online shops also unfortunately often use vouchers that are too high in their CRM measures without considering where the customer currently is in the lifecycle. High vouchers are not always necessary and unnecessarily harm profitability.

As a general rule, the more recent the purchase, the lower the need to lure customers with high vouchers. For anyone who wants to go deeper into customer segmentation, we wrote the article on RFM segmentation for advanced repeat-purchase campaigns. For the purpose of this article, however, it is enough to understand that the timing of the last purchase has a significant influence on the success of our second-purchase campaign and that we need to adapt the incentive accordingly.

Shortly after a purchase, your customers are activated and ideally satisfied with their purchase. In this window, it is important to address them with suitable options for another purchase. The longer ago the last purchase was, the more inactive customers typically become and the less likely a repeat purchase becomes. For these customers, compelling offers, often in the form of vouchers, are necessary to motivate them to buy again. You can learn more about the art of choosing the right voucher amount in our article on discount ladders.

In addition to pure voucher campaigns, these campaign types are suitable for convincing customers to purchase again:

  • Cross-selling and bundles: show customers products that are complementary to their first purchase and make sense as an addition. Shortly after the first purchase, a small voucher or limited-time offer is often enough as an incentive. If you sell your products in bundles, offer customers the option to retrospectively convert their purchase into a bundle and save money.

  • Upselling and subscription: offer customers the option to switch afterward to a larger quantity with volume discount or to your savings subscription. The customer has now had the chance to test your product and will gladly accept your offer if satisfied.

  • Refill campaign: make customers an offer to refill shortly before the end of the consumption cycle. Instead of a voucher, you can often use a free product or your savings subscription as the incentive.

  • Feedback campaign: ask customers specifically about their satisfaction with the purchase. As a thank-you, offer a discount on the next purchase. If the campaign is used skillfully, you can also collect customer reviews and social-media reach.

  • Limited VIP offer and flash sales: we all like to feel special. A VIP campaign is perfect here. Offer limited products that can be purchased first or exclusively, while supplies last.

  • App, membership and loyalty program: here you do not promote a direct repeat purchase, but participation in your loyalty or membership program, or, if available, downloading your app, usually combined with a one-time or permanent discount. You can strengthen the effect further by applying the discount to the previous purchase as well.

Which channels are especially suitable?

There are several ways to move customers to a repeat purchase, and we generally support anything that helps you create repeat buyers. However, some channels, such as your own loyalty program or even your own app, come with high initial investments. For most online merchants, it is therefore better to start with the basics. From our perspective, these are:

  • Email: the classic. Cheap, fast and flexible. If done well, emails can be highly individualized and therefore significantly more relevant. Unfortunately, the simplicity of the channel also tempts brands to send far too many emails, which has been reducing the effectiveness of this channel for years. Customers increasingly become blind to emails. Nevertheless, every online shop should use email to inform customers promptly and regularly about offers. The major disadvantage, however, is that you need explicit consent from customers in order to contact them for advertising purposes. As a result, you unfortunately do not reach the majority of your customers, often even less than 20%.

  • Direct mail, for example postcards: direct marketing is back and offers unbeatable advantages for your marketing mix. The biggest plus compared with email is that you can write to all your customers even without explicit opt-in. In addition, this channel is much longer-lasting than classic advertising on a screen. A postcard is kept for 17 days on average and still leads to conversions weeks later. And while most people are annoyed by too many emails and spam in their inbox, letters and postcards are now so rare that most customers are genuinely happy to receive a postcard from a favorite brand. The disadvantage compared with email is cost, which is why postcards should be used in a targeted way.

Ideally, you combine both channels in your customer communication. Usually it makes sense to start with email. Then you send your postcard campaign to all customers who did not convert. This increases the probability of conversion among customers you already contacted by email and also reaches all customers who did not receive your emails.

Frequently asked question: why email and postcards together? Should I not do only one or the other?

You do not need to worry that you will overwhelm and annoy customers by combining email and postcard. The media break means customers will not perceive the advertising as spam. On the contrary, we regularly see up to 20% higher conversion rates for customers who receive both email and postcard compared with customers who receive only the postcard.

If you still want to split your target audience and send postcards only to customers who did not receive or read your emails, we ask for a little patience. We are currently working on a Klaviyo integration. This will make such advanced segments possible.

Now that we have looked at what makes a good second-purchase campaign and which channels you should use to send it, the next article explains when you should send the campaign.