As a store owner, you know the importance of responding to new customers promptly and efficiently. Your store’s new customer autoresponder email should be crucial to your customer service strategy. This email should be engaging, informative, and tailored to customers’ needs.
It should provide them with the information they need to make a purchasing decision while also connecting with them personally. With the right content, your store’s new customer autoresponder email can help you create a positive customer experience, build loyalty, and ensure your customers return.
In this article, we’ll walk you through some tips and tricks on writing the best autoresponder email for your new customers. Let’s get into it!
Why You Need An Autoresponder Email
You’ve attracted customers to your store who signed up for your service or purchased one of your products. You’re rubbing your hands together in glee, thinking you’ve made it. You only need to provide the service or ship the package your new customer purchased.
Hold on, now. I hate to break it to you, but your relationship with your customer is just starting. Think about it. Do you know of any human relationship that survives without communication? You must do what friends do to maintain a relationship with a friend. Communicate with each other.
The same applies to your relationship with a customer. They will forget about you if you don’t keep in touch. And trust me, plenty of businesses worldwide will be happy to step in and try to seduce that soon-to-be ex-client away from you.
So, what do you do?
Make Good Use of Your Autoresponder
You likely have WooCommerce set up to fire off a thank you email when someone places an order on your site. But is that enough? Well, no. It’s a start, but you want to impress, right?
You don’t want this to be a boring first date where the other party walks away and never thinks of you again, leaving you wondering what went wrong. And frankly, that thank you message is pretty generic, right? It’s just a polite phrase you’ve hopefully been taught to say.
This will all sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t. Much of it can be automated based on what your customer signs up for, even what they’ve purchased.
Provide Care Guides or How-to Instructions
Remember The Store case study in the Coupon Deals to Subsets post? The store owner now has many people buying those costly handbags, all because of word of mouth—from the initial subset he sent coupons to.
It would be bad for him to take those orders, send that generic thank you, and go no further. He sends a personalized, automated message to each new handbag buyer.
The email is full of helpful info about the care of the bag. Of course, that info is available somewhere on his website, but isn’t it a nice touch to hand it to your customer?
The email also includes a list of dos and don’ts, like not setting your premium leather purse down in a puddle. In this case, our store owner thanked the customer and provided them with helpful info.
Include a Coupon for an Add-on Item
Now that he’s on his way to being a marketing mastermind, you know what else he’s done? He’s added a coupon to the email.
Even though the checkout page offers an add-on, many people blow right past those. I know I do, especially when I’m already wincing about the money I’m about to part with.
The customer now has an email detailing what they must do to take care of their purchase, and you’ve conveniently added a time-sensitive coupon for something that will help them do that.
In our store owner’s case, he’s offering 15% off a little kit that will help protect and maintain leather goods. And that offer is included in every autoresponder email to customers who have purchased leather goods. It’s ingenious. And very, very effective.
Include a Coupon for Recurring Purchases
I do a lot of shopping on Amazon, and they have this unique feature where you can subscribe to things you need to buy repeatedly. Ultimately, I get a deal, and they get my repeat business. Too bad you couldn’t do something like that in your WooCommerce store.
You can! Perhaps not, in the same manner Amazon does it, but we’re talking about autoresponders and coupons, so let’s make it work that way. And you don’t need to limit this method to new customers.
Keeping this up with repeat buyers might be a good idea if it makes financial sense. It’s often cheaper to keep existing customers than to source new ones, so keep that in mind.
If your store sells something like deodorant or toilet paper, this isn’t hard to figure out, but it may take some thought. Think about your inventory. What do you sell that people are going to need again? Does your store sell make-up?
Not only does it have a shelf life, but it also runs out, and it needs to be purchased again.
How about office products? Once the copy paper runs out, they have to buy more. Again, you need to determine what in your store qualifies as something people will buy again.
Offer a Coupon for Similar Products
I recently bought a new laptop online. Guess what was included in the autoresponder email? A coupon for a new desktop. Forget about a coupon for a case for my laptop. They went right to the top of the line.
Don’t be afraid to get creative when it comes to similar products. Have some fun with it. Think of your own shopping habits. Does this tend to go with that?
Some things will be more obvious. Does your store sell running shoes? Or any sports shoes, for that matter? If the customer didn’t buy extra laces, how about adding a coupon for some in your autoresponder? And not just those boring old laces we had when we were kids. There are all kinds of
So, just as you needed to do above when considering what might be a recurring sale product, give some thought to your inventory. If you sell bread, include a coupon for butter. If you sell peanut butter, include a coupon for jam. You get the idea.
Conclusion
Let’s recap. What are a few things you could and should include in the autoresponder email that goes to a new customer?
- Care Guides or How-to Instructions
- Coupons for an Add-on Item
- Recurring Purchases Coupons
- Coupons for Similar Products
Note that this list is by no means complete. Nor is it limited to stores that sell digital or physical goods. Depending on the service, you can do the same thing if you sell a service.
Here’s an interesting statistic to close with. Recent figures show that the open rate of onboarding or welcome emails is nearly 60%. That is an astounding available rate!
According to some recent MailChimp data, the average open rate across all industries is about 21%, with the lowest at about 15% and the highest at 27%. That puts the available rate of an onboarding email at more than double the highest rates attained on any email campaign.
What do all those numbers mean? You are missing an incredible opportunity if you fail to use the welcome emails you send to your customers.
