WooCommerce Post-Purchase Emails: Drive Repeat Sales From Your New Customers

Editorial Team
October 23, 2023
WooCommerce Post-Purchase Emails: Drive Repeat Sales From Your New Customers

Do you want to set up WooCommerce post purchase emails that help boost your customers’ lifetime value?

Creating a post-purchase experience for your customers minimizes buyer's remorse, maximizes customer satisfaction and lays the groundwork for future sales.

It’s a powerful tool to have in your marketing arsenal.

A well-thought WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence can help you generate repeat purchases and boost your revenues significantly.

In this post, we’ll explore the intricacies of WooCommerce post purchase emails and how to set them up in your store.

What are WooCommerce Post-Purchase Emails?

WooCommerce post-purchase emails are the emails that are sent to the customer after they make their purchase from your store.

You can create a strong bond with your first-time customers by giving them a wholesome post-purchase experience.

Here’s a WooCommerce post-purchase email example from Graze:

WooCommerce post-purchase email example from Graze offering 15% discount off on the next purchase

As you can see, this email first thanks their customers for the order. Then, sends out a 15% discount coupon on the next purchase.

This is a great way to encourage customers to go for their next purchase.

If you want to retain your customers and increase repeat purchases, then a WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence is one of the most effective eCommerce automations you should try.

Types of WooCommerce Post-Purchase Emails

In this section, we’ll explore the types of post-purchase emails you can set up in your WooCommerce store.

1. Transactional emails

Transactional emails are sent to customers when they take a specific action or make a certain transaction. 

These emails are often time-sensitive and provide essential information or updates to the recipients.

Here are some common examples of transactional emails:

  • Order confirmation emails - Customers receive an order confirmation or a thank you email when they complete a purchase. This email contains the order details such as order number, list of items purchased, shipping information, payment method, and more.
  • Shipment notifications - A shipment notification email is sent to customers when their order is shipped. It includes shipment tracking information, including a tracking number, URL, and an estimated delivery date.
  • Delivery confirmation emails - When a customer receives their order, a delivery confirmation email is sent to acknowledge the delivery receipt. 

Some other examples include emails with password reset, new account registrations, major subscription emails, and more.

2. Promotional emails

WooCommerce post-purchase promotional emails are email notifications sent to customers after they have made a purchase.

These emails are designed to encourage additional purchases and drive engagement.

These are some of the examples of promotional emails:

  • Upsells and cross-sell emails - These emails suggest complementary or relevant products based on the item the customer has purchased. These personalized product recommendation emails interest the customers for another purchase, which is quite a common practice in eCommerce.
  • Discount and offer emails - Offer special discounts and exclusive deals to customers to customers who have recently purchased from your store. These discount emails encourage repeat business and brand loyalty.
  • Product review emails - Ask customers to write reviews for purchased products. This is an important process because new shoppers always look for social proof before buying any item. You can offer incentives such as discounts or loyalty points for writing reviews.

Other promotional emails include product education, loyalty program invitations, survey request emails, event announcements, and more.

3. Retention emails

Retention emails are an important component of WooCommerce post purchase email campaigns. 

These emails aim to build long-term customer relationships and prevent churn, ensuring that your customers continue to make purchases from your business.

Here are some common types of post-purchase retention emails:

  • Anniversary emails - Send purchase anniversary emails to celebrate your customer’s initial purchase. This will remind them of their history with your business and potentially offer a special deal to encourage another purchase.
  • Educational content - Providing helpful and informative content related to customer’s past purchases. You can include how-to guides, tips, and tutorials to enhance your customers’ experience with your products.
  • Re-engagement emails - Send re-engagement or winback emails to customers who haven’t made a purchase from your WooCommerce store in a while. You can offer incentives like discount coupons or remind them of the value of your products and services.

Some other retention emails include birthday reminders, product updates, new arrivals, exclusive VIP offers, and more.

Why WooCommerce Post-Purchase Email Campaigns Are Important?

Studies have shown that it costs 5 times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Therefore, it is important to retain your customers and build a loyal relationship with them.

Also, even if you spend that much money to acquire new customers, remember that 80% of them will never buy anything from you.

This is where a WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence can help you engage with your existing customers and get repeat purchases from them.

Here’s what Harvard Business Review says about how much post-purchase experience matters:

"What we found: after controlling for other factors that drive repeat purchases in the transaction-based business (for example, how often the customer needs the type of goods and services that the company sells), customers who had the best past experiences spent 140% more compared to those who had the poorest past experience."

A study done by Medallia confirmed that a good customer experience could lead to higher sales in a transaction-based business.

post purchase experience can drive sales according to HBR

As you can see, sales are driven by providing a great experience to your customers.

That’s why sending post-purchase emails can help you retain customers better, generate repeat purchases, and save customer acquisition costs.

With these emails, you can boost user engagement with higher open rates and conversions.

This will further lead to higher lifetime value for your customers and benefit your WooCommerce store in the long run.

How to Create an Automated WooCommerce Post-Purchase Email Sequence?

Whenever a user buys from your WooCommerce store, you need to send them some transactional emails like order confirmation, shipment confirmation, and more.

Today, we will show you how you can create an automated post-purchase workflow that can engage with your customers even when you are asleep.

Just set it up once, and it will keep driving those repeat sales. We are going to use FunnelKit Automations to build our email sequences.

FunnelKit Automations offers ever-growing library of pre-built recipes that can be imported with a single click. Our library includes abandoned cart recovery, review collection, turning subscriber into customer, welcome sequence, and much more.

The minimalist Canvas interface simplifies the workflow creation for you. You can also send broadcast campaigns, other nifty features include advance delay options, adding myriad of actions, setting goals to automation, and much more.

FunnelKit Automations is a game-changer for your WordPress marketing automation.

So first, you need to install and activate FunnelKit Automations on your website.

FunnelKit Automations is available in two versions - the lite version and the pro version.

While the lite version gives you enough resources to start building your abandoned cart recovery sequence, welcome sequence, winback campaigns, and much more, the pro version unlocks broadcasting features and even more triggers.

Follow the instructions to install and activate FunnelKit Automations on your WordPress website.

Let’s start setting up the WooCommerce post purchase emails sequence in your store.

Add a new automation and select the event trigger

Head to the dashboard and click Campaigns >> Automations (Next Gen) under FunnelKit Automations.  

Hit the ‘Add New Automations’ button.

Adding a new automation

You’ll see a pool of pre-built automations that you can import with just one click and kickstart your email marketing right away.

However, we are going to build ours from scratch. For that, click on ‘Start from Scratch’ and assign a proper name to your new automation.

Here we’ll go for the WooCommerce post purchase email.

Click on start from scratch and name your automation

Clicking on ‘Create’ will add the new automation to your workspace.

Hit ‘Select Trigger’ and a pop-up window will appear that will illustrate various triggers for your automation.

Select trigger to add the event trigger

An event triggers your automation. In our case, we are going to select WooCommerce >> Order Created.

Add the order created event trigger to your workflow

Now, configure the order statuses. This will depend on when you want to run the automation.

  • Completed: The order has been processed and shipped. No further action required.
  • On hold: Payment is awaited
  • Draft: The draft order gets created when shoppers initiate the checkout
  • Processing: When the order has been placed and the order is in the processing stage of the fulfillment process

We are going to keep our WooCommerce order status as ‘Completed’.

Configure the order created event trigger for your woocommerce post purchase email

We have illustrated three unique WooCommerce post-purchase email sequences for you.

You can use any one of the three as per your requirement, or you can club them all and create one wholesome post-purchase experience for your first-time customers.

Now, let's move on to build our first automation.

Welcome email sequence for first-time buyers

According to Omnisend’s eCommerce Statistics Report, welcome emails are opened the most (31%), clicked 5X more than other emails, and have one of the highest conversion rates (52%).

Welcome emails are a great way to greet your customers and pave the path for their next purchase.

If you need to welcome your new subscribers, follow this article.

Let’s build an effective WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence to welcome your first-time customers.

After implementing the common step above, add a condition.

Click on plus icon and add a condition to your workflow

Click on Add New Condition.

Hit the add new condition button

Now, you have to set the condition for the first-time buyer. If their order is ‘First Order’, the subsequent automation will run on them. If it is not their first order, they won’t be a part of this automation.

Click on Order, and select ‘Is First Order?’

Specify the order condition to your conditional workflow

Configure the condition and set it to ‘Yes’. Then, save your conditional workflow.

Configure the condition and set it to yes

Now, if the condition is true, you send an email welcoming the first-time buyer and showing them around your store. You can add your best sellers and encourage new buyers to try them.

If the condition is not true, you can email them and thank them for buying from you again. Or you can exit the false condition too.

After you add the condition, do add a delay. You can add delays in minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months. We are going to set a delay of 30 minutes.

adding a delay to your woocommerce post purchase email automation

We are going to set a delay of 30 minutes.

configuring the delay of 30 minutes

Click on the ‘+’ icon to add an Action. Then, add the ‘Send Email’ action under the Messaging section.

Add the send email action under the messaging section

Now, put your copywriting skills to the test and craft a good email to greet and welcome your new customers.

Write the woocommerce post purchase email content including the subject line and preview text

You can also use FunnelKit Automations’ built-in visual email builder to design attractive emails and send them to your customers.

This is what the final email sequence would look like:

woocommerce post purchase emails - welcome email sequence

Looking for ideas to design your welcome emails? Check out our 15 welcome email examples.

Next-purchase incentive email sequence (Discount email)

92% of US shoppers used discount coupons last year when buying something.

Most marketers use discount coupons as an attraction. Instead, you can use this strategy as a reward as well.

Let’s design a discount email sequence to incentivize your new customers with a discount coupon.

Add new automation and select your trigger - Order Created - as discussed in the common step.

As we did above, we will add a Condition and configure it for first-time buyers in this WooCommerce post purchase email sequence.

adding condition - discount based woocommerce post purchase email

If it’s the buyer’s first order, we will offer them a discount coupon; otherwise, a simple email with a thank you note would do.

You can either send the subsequent emails immediately or keep a delay of, say, 24 hours.

To add a delay, click on the '+' icon and add a delay.

Click on plus icon and add delay

Set the delay to 24 hours.

add the delay of 30 minutes to your woocommerce post purchase email sequence

To create a discount coupon. Add a ‘Create Coupon’ action under WooCommerce.

add the create coupon action under the woocommerce section in funnelkit automations

Now, configure the coupon settings:

  • Coupon Title: Assign a suitable name to your coupon for internal uses only.
  • Discount Type: The type of discount you want to give - percentage discount, a fixed cart discount (ex: $10), fixed product discount (ex: $10 off on product x, $20 off on product Y, etc.).
  • Amount: The amount of discount you want to give. We’ll allow a 10% discount irrespective of the customer’s cart total.
  • Coupon Code Prefix: Add a custom prefix which a 6-digit auto-generated code will follow up
  • Coupon Expiry: Create urgency with time-bound coupons.
  • Allow Free Shipping: You can give free shipping and your coupon code.
Create a 15% dynamic discount coupon in FunnelKit Automations

Once you have saved your coupon settings, copy the coupon code highlighted in the blue line.

Next, add the ‘Send Email’ action in Messaging and paste the coupon code into your email.

woocommerce post-purchase incentive email body content

If the condition is false, you can set up another email in the same way.

This is what your WooCommerce post purchase email sequence look:

woocommerce post purchase email sequence - Next-Purchase Incentive Email Sequence

👉 We have a detailed guide on how to create and send dynamic coupon codes and generate repeat sales.

First-purchase anniversary email sequence

A first-purchase anniversary email is one of the most effective ways to build a bond with customers!

These emails show your customers that you don’t see them as just buyers but as actual human beings who like to be greeted. You can take it a notch up by offering special discounts for them.

This email sequence is available to import with one click. However, if you want to build your own, follow the below-mentioned steps.

So, let’s build a WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence to greet your customers on their first-purchase anniversary.

Add the ‘First Order’ condition after following the abovementioned common step.

first purchase anniversary emails - add the first time buyer condition

Now, you have to set a delay. To do that, click on the ‘+’ icon and add a Delay.

Configure the delay to 365 days or 12 months.

After you set the delay, you need to create your email to congratulate the buyer on their first purchase anniversary.

You can also create a coupon code to urge them to buy from your store.

Add the ‘Create Coupon’ action and configure the coupon settings as discussed above. On such a special occasion, you can give them an exclusive coupon code discount of 25% OFF.

Create a 25% discount in FunnelKit Automations

Next, add the ‘Send Email’ action to your WooCommerce post purchase email sequence.

Write a kick-ass email copy and insert your coupon code. Instigate your audience to use the coupon code and make a purchase to celebrate their first purchase anniversary.

woocommerce post purchase email workflow for first-purchase anniversary email

For those who do not fit your condition, you can simply end the automation for them.

This is what the final workflow would look like:

woocommerce post purchase email - purchase anniversary offering discount

Well done! This is how you can create WooCommerce post purchase email workflows in your store and send them to your customers.

Best Practices and Some Examples of WooCommerce Post Purchase Emails

There are some proven best practices that all marketers should follow when designing their WooCommerce post-purchase emails.

Here are the four most effective tips to remember when designing your own.

1. Be grateful and offer assurance

Do you know when humans part with their hard-earned money, their stress level rises?

It might be due to second thoughts about their purchase, doubts about the product’s quality, or something else.

So, it’s important to thank your customers for their purchases and assure them they have spent their money wisely.

Here’s the WooCommerce post purchase email example from Beauty & Tailor:

woocommerce post purchase thank you email

This email assures them of the value and asks them to check back for exciting offers for their next purchase.

2. Schedule your emails correctly

WooCommerce post-purchase emails bring the best results when you nail the timing of your emails.

It is essential that you create appropriate delays between your emails so that the right emails go out at the right time.

3. Educate your customers about the product and offer recommendations

Welcome emails boast some of the highest open rates and conversions, and thus, it’s a good practice to recommend your other products in these emails.

You can send them follow-up emails with tips and tricks to get the best out of the product. For example, if someone buys hair gel from your store, recommend the best hairstyles that they can do with it.

You can also cross-sell by recommending complementary products to the one they’ve just purchased. For example, if someone has bought a shirt from your store, recommend a trouser to them.

4. Request a review

A review lets you know what your customers like about your product and what they don’t.

Asking for a review makes your customer feel valued. It assures them that you care about their opinions and are open to suggestions.

Here’s a wonderful request review email example from Asos:

review request email - woocommerce post purchase email sequence

A review email can be a crucial part of your WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence.

👉 Head to this post if you want to see more WooCommerce automated follow up emails that you can automate.

Are You Ready to Build Your WooCommerce Post-Purchase Email Sequence?

Today, we discussed how you could design three unique email sequences to give your new customers a great post-purchase experience.

But that’s not it!

There is so much more you can do to create one wholesome WooCommerce post-purchase email sequence.

As we said, it's not just important to minimize buyer remorse but also to maximize repeat sales.

Customer acquisition costs are soaring, and it is crucial to have these automated sequences do all the magic for you, even while you sleep!

Get, set, and automate with FunnelKit Automations - the most powerful WordPress marketing automation engine that can handle all your CRM needs.

So, what are you waiting for?

Author: Editorial Team
The Editorial Team at FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels) is a passionate group of writers and copy editors. We create well-researched posts on topics such as WordPress automation, sales funnels, online course creation, and more. We aim to deliver content that is interesting and actionable.

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