 Hello, everybody. I hope you're all doing well. Thank you for joining me today to talk about encouraging repeat purchase behavior with your customers. Let's jump right in. My name is Samyanta Naraharisetti. I'm a product manager at House. For those of you that are unfamiliar with House, we are a home design inspiration platform. We also have a e-commerce slash marketplace at House that sell home goods and furniture and that is the team that I'm part of. Here at our marketplace, I specifically focus on repeat purchase behavior and the overall customer lifetime value. If you'd like to connect with me later or just ask many questions, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look for me with my full name. A little bit of background about me. I started off my career as an iOS developer for a banking client without a consultancy services. Here I was working on building iPhone and iPad applications for this banking client. I left that role to pursue my master's, get an MBA. I went to business school at the University of Arizona with the hopes of actually moving into tech consulting. While in school and through my internship, I got introduced to the field of product management and decided to pursue that field instead. Out of school, I landed a product manager position at Overstock on their mobile apps team. Thanks to my iOS Dev background. At Overstock, I was focused on customer acquisition and conversion, so essentially getting people to download the app and make a purchase on the app. After Overstock, I moved on to Carfax to launch a new product for them from scratch. So this was like a web-based product. It was a web-based marketplace and my focus was organic traffic growth and user engagement on the platform itself. So here's the agenda for today. We'll start off with quickly looking at the definition of repeat purchase and why you should care about instilling a repeat behavior with your customers. We'll also talk about what counts as repeat, is it just conversion? Finally, we'll look at some tactics or levers that encourage repeat along with some examples that some other companies are doing with these tactics. So firstly, what is repeat purchase? As the name suggests, repeat purchase is buying from you or buying your product over and over again. This can be prompted or unprompted. We'll go over what that means shortly. But it is building that behavior until it comes naturally to your customer that you are no longer investing in them anymore. Typically, this behavior is measured in a metric called repeat purchase rate, and it looks at how many customers place more than one order in a given period of time, whether that's 30 days, 90 days, or even 12 months. Repeat rates can vary from industry to industry and business to business. So you need to measure accordingly when you're looking at the repeat rate at your company. For example, average repeat rate in retail e-commerce tends to be between 20 and 30 percent. But like I said, it can vary from company to company. Now that we've set the state on what repeat means, we need to quickly talk about why this is a big deal. A direct result of repeat behavior is obviously more sales and higher GMB or gross merchandise value. But it also lowers your customer acquisition costs because you are now spending less and less to make that sale. These repeat customers, they tend to be great advocates for your brand because they like your product, they keep coming back and now they become great sources of word of mouth, like organic marketing for you. Finally, this behavior builds loyalty with and for your customers, which is just great to have. Now, so far in our conversation, when we talk about repeat, we've only been talking about sales or conversion, but a sale is not always the right approach because your customer, they may just not be ready yet. They might be higher up in their purchase journey of funnel. This is why repeat should not just be about conversion. You need to think about in two ways, conversion and engagement. So conversion, yes, it directly moves the needle on the repeat purchase rate, but when the time is not right, you need to think long-term. You need to find ways to engage your user so that when they're finally ready, you're on top of mine for them, they come to you to make that purchase. Continuous and meaningful engagement is a great way to have stickiness for your product. So far we've talked about what repeat purchase means, why it's important. Now let's look at some levers and tactics to improve repeat purchase rate. So the levers are in a very high-level product. Your post purchase experience and marketing. So within each of these levers, there are some tactics that various companies use and we'll go over each of them. I also wanna go back to the conversation about repeat behavior being both conversion and engagement and not just conversion. You'll notice that each of these tactics falls into either one of them or both depending on like who you are and how you're using each of these tactics. And as we talk through each of these, I encourage you to think about what you're currently doing at your company or what else you could be doing related to each of these. So let's talk about product first. First and foremost is the product itself. So we're talking about your digital product, whatever it is, an app or a website. The user experience on your product must be frictionless. A user should be able to go from start to finish seamlessly. I'd encourage you to test a customer's happy path on your website from time to time and reevaluate it. See if there's anything that needs to be changed. You need to ensure that the overall product, it's easy to use and if you can, make it fun. It makes the customer want it to come back. Do a lingo does if any of you have used it. Next is signups. So signups or account creation is a valuable weapon to have as a product owner. Once you have a user's email address or phone number, you can target them and communicate with your users throughout their purchase journey and even afterwards to bring them back. A common way to get a user's email or phone number is using pop-ups or models across the site and they're usually like an incentive or coupon attached. You'll see this when you visit a website for the first time or even after you've made a purchase, you'll see them trying to get you to create an account. So speaking of coupons or incentives, you can simply give your customers an incentive for the next purchase. And this is what we talked about earlier in the repeat purchase definition about prompted or unprompted sales. This is sometimes the first step in getting the user to like what they're buying from you and to keep coming back. Hopefully for subsequent purchases, they come back on their own and you're not like having to invest more coupons in this user. But you need to remember to be strategic about your coupons, give them an expiration date, give them like a coupon max price or like a minimum spend. You need to find the right coupon for you, for your bottom line and for your budget. So, in this example, like you can see, Portland Pi is giving away coupons for like $5 max after spending a minimum of $25 because that's what makes sense for them. So you need to evaluate what makes sense for you. The fourth tactic is app downloads. In general, app users tend to have higher engagement and conversion rates. You're always on their phone in front of their eyes and if they're giving a real estate on your phone, it means they like you, at least a little bit. And apps are able to communicate with the user almost immediately through like push notifications with just like a gate engagement play. A very common way to like get more app downloads is via smart banners on mobile web. You must have seen these banners on a lot of like mobile websites. So it's just like a little banner at the top. These are great because when a user clicks on them, it takes them to the app store and then jumps them to the app. So the user's kind of left kind of seamlessly using your product on the app from mobile web. Next up is personalization. Personalization is important because you and I are not the same. Your website should not be looking the same for both you and me. You should be personalizing the site to your customer based on their activity on your site. So basically what they've been doing on your site plus what many other customers like this very customer have been doing on your site. This is called collaborative phishing and it's more sites like Amazon and a lot of other like sites use. Have you ever noticed that when you're browsing for a product, you see suggestions of other items that may be similar to the one that you're looking at or sometimes you get recommended a very random product and you end up buying it. So we are using personalization as a way to get users to explore more products until they find the one that they like and want to buy. In a repeat context, sometimes when a user has already made a purchase, we can recommend them other products. This can be either via email or when they come back to your site. These recommendations can either be the complementary nature. So for example, recommend a brand to somebody that is just bought a couch or these recommendations can be completely like expertory in nature. So maybe you're recommending a bathroom vanity to somebody who's just bought a couch because you think this user might have moved into a new house. So recommendations like these, they encourage users to click around and buy more items and kind of keep coming back to your site. The next tactic is a good rewards program. This is a form of gamification and it's a great way to keep the user coming back, whether you're giving them like points for making a purchase that they can redeem later or giving them points, writing reviews or giving them like fee shipping, pre-ridones, whatever it is, if it's something that benefits them and it's something that will excite them or something that they will care about, it is a great way to keep the users coming back. You need to find out like what users are excited about and put them as first way of rewards program. So you're making that behavior, bringing them back to make more and more purchases. And finally, community building. This is by the people, for the people play. You are more likely to believe your friends and your family or even your community rather than like a company that's trying to sell you their product. This is kind of the same way. So having ratings and reviews or customer Q&A, it engages users on your platform and it provides social proof about your product to other new users. I mean, think about how many times you've bought a product of a reading reviews on Amazon because now you trust the product even more. This is a way to encourage users to give back to the community also because if you as a user if you've made a purchase based on other reviews, a lot of the times you're enticed to come back and give reviews that may be helpful for others. So you're keeping users engaged on your platform. So moving on to the next lever, which is a post-purchase experience. The tactics here are not necessarily like related to your website or app or just your product itself but it plays a crucial role in the overall experience the user has with their company. You want them to like feel good and confident about coming back to you to make a second or more purchase with you. The first tactic here is logistics. A lot of retail companies today, they've trained our customers to expect really quick, super fast delivery. If you're a company that can do this, play this to your advantage. But if it's not possible for you, like sometimes really fast shipping can be really expensive or sometimes it just might be not possible because you ship like large items. In this case, your best bet is to be as accurate and honest as you can with your customers. So they know what to expect when they're making that purchase. And finally, you wanna make the whole process easy for them. For example, if you need to schedule a delivery, don't make them do like a million things before they can actually do that. Like make it super quick, make it one platform so they're not jumping across websites. And just make it overall pretty easy. The next one is post purchase transactional communication, meaning emails or push notifications or maybe even SMS related to a customer's order. As a user, you always want to be in the know about your order, get to know when your order's confirmed, if it's shipped, if it's delivered, any tracking information, if it's going to be late, et cetera. This is a nice way to alleviate any anxiety for the user and provide a good experience for them. Also, have you noticed sometimes that these emails have product recommendations? So this is a nice way to cross-sell your customers and other products and get them to make a purchase like after they've already made a purchase. So the third one is returns and just the return process. You wanna be clear and upfront about what your return policy is so your user is not left surprised. Keep the process easy and stress-free as you can and give the user options on where they wanna return things if they wanna do things digitally or manually. Just things like that you need to, again, if the theme is on a post purchase, you need to keep it simple. And lastly, having a good customer service team can make a lot of difference. Your customer service agent should know your product and be able to answer questions and help the user navigate a problem with ease. Anytime you launch a new feature or product, customer training should be one of your to-do items as part of your product launch strategy. You should also look at providing self-service options because not everybody wants to call in or wait on the phone, especially for me and I'm sure many of you, you'd rather just do it on your phone rather than call in and get it done. Great. So our last lever is marketing. I do wanna point out that there are many more things that you can do under marketing here, but I'm only outlining things that you can do pertaining to like repeat conversion or engagement, but obviously marketing is like a huge bubble. So the first is paid retargeting or remarketing. A shopper rarely, you know, they make a purchase in their first session on your website or anybody's website. It usually like takes a couple of rounds, a couple of sessions before a user, you know, they come to your site, they see a product and they feel like, you know, they're ready to make a purchase. So sometimes in the process, they might not come back. So what you wanna do is you wanna reel them back in because these are customers that have shown high shopping intent on your site. You know, they've viewed a product or two, they spent a lot of time on your site. So retargeting ads are a great way to do that. I'm sure many of you have seen this and they're a great way to remind the customer of a product that they were browsing. How many times has this happened to you? You were looking at a product, you know, maybe some boots, you go away and see an ad for the same boost on like a blog or on Facebook. You get maximum impact if you pick a certain set of audience, like users who have been browsing a certain number of products or users who've spent like X amount of time on your site or users who have ordered a cart or little bushes but didn't make a purchase. So keep your audience, target them, and then you can show these ads to kind of bring them back. Next and last is cross-shadow communication. This just means that you're using multiple channels or modes of communication to target and speak to your customers and to engage them in various ways. So the next couple of slides is all going to be like a bunch of different, I guess, channels that you can communicate. So the first one, promotional emails are a good way to communicate with your customer from time to time, you know, while they're making a purchase or after. Apart from like transactional emails, this is a way to tell them, you know, a bit more, maybe, you know, like be it about like a seasonal sale or offers or like, you know, best sellers on your site. I mean, think about how many memory emails did you get and how many did you actually click through and maybe even made a purchase. This is a great way again to like stay top of mind for your customer. Another category of emails is user triggered emails, meaning a user gets these as a result of taking action or a certain set of actions on your site. So some examples are cart abandonment. So a user added a product to their cart but left it for placing an order. Or another example is back in stock. So a user gave you their email to allow them when an item is back in stock or drops in price. These encouraged user to, you know, like these emails, they encouraged user to take an action directly. And typically these users tend to be like high converters because, you know, they're shown again, like high shopping intent with the actions they've taken on your site. So it's important for you to have such reengaging emails and also don't forget to like optimize them for their content and also like subject lines. One thing that, you know, I'd like to add about emails whether they are like promotional or user triggered emails is that timing is more important than the email content itself. Meaning when you send the email is highly important and it can actually affect your like email open rate and click through rates. You don't want to be sending emails to someone to shop on your website, you know, as they're just waking up in the morning or they're driving to work. You know, you don't want to be left unread. So many, you know, you'll find many like email marketing platforms today. They have the ability to intelligently send emails to the users basically when the user is more likely to open an email from you. You know, if you don't already, I would highly recommend investing in such a tool just, you know, to get, you know, like I said, better email open rates and click through rates. It will eventually like add up. Another mode of communication with the customers is, you know, like on your app via push notifications. Like we saw in the app download tactic, these users tend to be like highly engaged users. So push notifications is a powerful communication tool and can get a user to take an action as soon as they see it. But, you know, like obviously push notifications can be tricky because they tend to have low subscription rates and they're also like one time. So when you click on a notification, it goes away and the user can find it again. So, you know, like I would say these are the two cons, but, you know, if you have high subscribers, like that is great. A common way that a lot of companies improve their push notification subscription rate is to show users some kind of value prop to subscribing. So usually they'll say, you know, like there's a popup when you don't know the app, they'll say, you know, don't miss any sale or get instant order updates when you subscribe to push, et cetera. So make sure you have some kind of an onboarding to help people subscribe to push notifications. And our last cross-channel communication mode is SMS. This is a relatively new channel that is being explored and very much like push notification. This is a very like instant mode of communication with your users. You know, you can provide like transactional messages, promotional messages on here. You know, in this example, Sweet Green, which is like a salad, you know, restaurant takeaway store, they were able to increase their conversion by 10%, excuse me, to 10% by sending coupons via SMS. So one thing to keep in mind though, is that there are a lot of like legal constraints about how you collect and use a user's phone number. So I just be wary of that, but this is definitely one of the newer channels that you should be exploring. And you know, it's been known to show the high conversion and repeat rates. So to reiterate, the levers to improve a repeat purchase rate are product, post-purchase experience and marketing. Remember that each of these tactics, you know, like falls into one of conversion or engagement of both depending on how you use them and what your business is. And you know, lastly, a sale takes time. So invest in your customer, engage them until they're ready and until you can make that sale. Yeah, thank you all so much for your time today. I'd encourage each and every one of you to think about, you know, what levers and tactics make sense in your industry and your company. Think about what behaviors a customer take, both, you know, long-term and short-term behaviors, before making a purchase and you understand like what your levers are, you know, for your team or your company. And yeah, finally, you know, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, you know, if you have any questions, if you'd just like to chat. Yeah, thank you, everybody.