Post Purchase Customer Follow Up

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Sean Cohen

Integrating a follow up campaign to customers after they purchase is often more important than pre-purchase follow up.

Build an Email List of Customers

Automatically building a customer list so you can preform post purchase follow up, lower your returns, deliver digital documents and up sell related products automatically without the headache of doing it all manually. Integrating AWeber with your shopping cart service can do all this and more.

Post Purchase Follow Up

Now that you have that list of customers you can automatically follow up with them about their purchase. Satisfaction is one of the key elements to sales, that not only makes people feel more comfortable, but can also dramatically lower returns. Would lowering your return rate just a few percentage points increase your annual income?

Deliver Digital Documents

You can use autoresponders to deliver your digital products automatically. Once you have a confirmed email address on file
for your customer you can send them a link to download your product directly. Have a small file you need to send them after they purchase? Just add it as an attachment.

Up Sell Related Products

Having an email list of the people who have already purchased your product is key to repeat business and referrals. Imagine
being able to drop an email to known buyers when you have a new related product to release. You’ve now started a buzz about your new offer, maybe even started getting sales, before you have released it to the public.

AWeber Integrates with Shopping Carts

AWeber makes this entire process simple and easy for anyone to start doing. We use a technology known as email parsers to integrate with most shopping cart services on the market.

The email parser works by going through the confirmation email that you receive after a customer places an order. It then selects the appropriate information and places this in your database. You now have this information stored in your AWeber account so the customer can confirm they want to be on your customer opt-in list.

Currently, AWeber is configured for several major shopping carts and payment processors such as Paypal, Clickbank, 1Shoppingcart, Regsoft, Stormpay and PayDotCom. We can also integrate with just about all 3rd party shopping carts you just need to let us know which one you use.

Print This Post

17 Responses

MaryAnn
July 28th, 2006 at 12:04 pm

I am delighted with these marketing articles and am finding them very helpful. AWeber is by far on top when it comes to service. Thanks!
Jen Tschida
July 29th, 2006 at 10:00 am

This is great news! I’ve been trying to find the most efficient way of merging my Aweber account (which I can’t live without!) with everything else I’m implementing to automate as much of my sales and customer service process as I can.

One question, do you plan to include information on how to use Aweber with 2Checkout?

Thanks!
Jim Cockrum
July 29th, 2006 at 4:54 pm

No website? No problem - you just need aweber.com

Great article Sean - I’m writing an article about this very topic that teaches non-techie types how to sell info products and mini-reports on eBay without the need for a website. An eBay seller can simply use an autoreponder with file attachments.
Bob
July 30th, 2006 at 11:53 am

Thanks for starting your Blog.
I am looking forward to reading all of the tips and techniques that will help to improve our email responses.
Tom Kulzer
July 31st, 2006 at 9:39 am

Jen,

Tracey from our support team will be in contact regarding 2Checkout. Please note that we can work with any 3rd party hosted shopping cart service, we just need a bit of information about how they format transactions. ie) sample receipts.
Brian Nelson
August 1st, 2006 at 1:50 pm

Thanks for the reminder of the importance of aftersales follow-up Sean.

I was wondering if you have integrated to zen-cart which is a fork of oscommerce. I would like to add this to my site today, but not if the new customers need to verify an email to get the follow-up.

Any suggestions?
B. Hopkins
August 1st, 2006 at 4:28 pm

I have managed to integrate Paypal subscription signups with Aweber. It was actually easier than I thought it would be. (Keep in mind I am a programmer however….)

Maybe I’ll write up a little how-to article to let others know how I did it….
Tom Kulzer
August 1st, 2006 at 4:37 pm

B. Hopkins,

Did you use the Paypal email parser that’s built in? It should be pretty straight forward to use.
B. Hopkins
August 6th, 2006 at 3:01 pm

I tried to use the original parser, but for some reason it didn’t work…. I’m not sure why.

My changes weren’t that extensive, but I did manage to get it to work, and once it did work, it worked great!
Marie Spaulding
August 12th, 2006 at 10:08 pm

We are just transitioning our service from human powered to a fully automated, self-serve program and have been searching for an autoresponder solution that we could use with PayPal and PayDotCom.

This is my second or third visit to your website today & I am so glad I chose this topic in your blog to browse…it is EXACTLY what we need.

Relieved!
danilo
August 13th, 2006 at 7:53 am

excellent service, great training on how to create an effective auto-responder system!
A. Christensen
September 30th, 2006 at 4:37 am

Some excellent ideas here …we signed up for aWeber last week and are constantly discovering new & creative ways to use your services -thank you!
» Convert Shopping Cart Abandons - AWeber Blog
October 20th, 2006 at 11:27 am

[…] Of course, you’ll want to follow up with customers after they do buy, and take them off that “abandons” list using an automation rule. This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 11:26 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink. […]
» Build Subscription Paths With Automation - AWeber Blog
October 30th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

[…] I most commonly see this employed by users to follow up with customers, but there are certainly other potential uses as well. This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Articles & Tips, Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment response, trackback from your own site, or permalink. […]
David
March 29th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

Great information in this article. Where is the best place to get information on integrating with a Yahoo store?

Thanks for a great product and a great blog.
Patrick
June 5th, 2008 at 12:16 am

Has there been any progress for an OSCommerce integration like Brian mentioned above?

We really like to follow up with our shop customers using the AWeber Service.
Justin Premick
June 5th, 2008 at 9:11 am

Patrick,

As OSCommerce is a software-based solution that you install on your site (a server-side script), rather than a third-party hosted solution, we do not offer an email parser for it as we do for say, PayPal or Clickbank. You can read more on the reasons for this in our Knowledge Base.

The optimal way to integrate AWeber with OSCommerce is to redirect your customers after purchase to a page where they can submit their email address in a signup form (that you create using the Web Form Wizard in your AWeber account). Or in the event that your OSCommerce customers pay you via PayPal, you may prefer to use the AWeber PayPal integration.