If you think that your e-commerce is about generating traffic, converting that traffic into subscribers, nurturing your subscribers into quality prospects, and converting those prospects into paying customers, I have something to tell you: it could be the death of your business.

If you are aware of all of those nitty-gritty details, you know much but not too much. To evolve from an ordinary, hand-to-mouth type of, stagnant growth curve sort of a business to a chart-topping, prosperous corporation with a sustained momentum of growth, it’s not much to know much. 

Therefore, today we talk about one of the most crucial steps for success – a sustainable business growth model. 

What is a sustainable business growth model? In the simplest, shortest, and most clear-cut way, it is “the ability to thrive in the long term”. It is the state of being able to generate a continuous flow of profit. It has more to do with a long-term strategy rather than everyday operations. It involves foresight.

A vast majority of CEOs see their businesses getting slaughtered before their own eyes and they can never figure out what went wrong but the blame for their setup’s failure lies right at their door. They might be selling the most valuable products or the best services in town but all they do is to put them out online, work hard to get clients, and then the moment the decision has been made, the money is exchanged and the customer leaves their space, that is the end of their relationship. Much like the store on the highway where you go to get what you need, come back, and then never think about it again. 

That’s why, short term profit grabs won’t do you any good. It requires a much greater cost, a magnanimous effort, a lot of ad campaigns, and many many restless days and sleepless nights to get fresh new customers into the pipeline than to sell to your existing ones. Not just that, a loyal customer trusts you more, spends more, and spreads the word. Now here comes the fact: since loyal customers are more likely to spend and they spend more (67% more relative to new customers), research shows that they make up for about 80% of the total revenue! This means that it is 60 to 70 times easier to sell your products or services to existing customers than a new customer. 

Numbers like these are hard to ignore and hence, the sustainability of a business can rightfully be linked to the continued relationship of a brand with its customer, with the power of loyalty, or more precisely, with the post purchase part of a sales funnel.

So why is a post purchase funnel crucial? Summing it up in a nutshell, it is your LAST EVER chance to pull the customer back into your funnel. The customer that you tried so hard to get in the first place. The customer on whom you spent a whack of cash to target, design ads that they would specifically love, and construct a website that they find easy to navigate. Just letting them go would be an expensive waste – or even, a menace to your business. 

This is why, it is so vitally important to focus on this last stage of marketing – to retain your customers, to encourage repeat purchases, to maintain growth, and to be a howling story success of success.

So let us take you through some state-of-the-art ways of organizing your sustainable growth strategies that will get your business off to a flying start, in essence, a guide to a brilliant post purchase funnel.

Create Fiercely Loyal Customers with an Attractive Customer Loyalty Program

Before getting into the fine points of a good customer loyalty program, let us tell you something; one customer may be enrolled in dozens of loyalty programs but is usually active in only a few of them. 

Thus, an effective loyalty program has two objectives:

1. To get as many new customers to sign up for it as possible

2. To get the customers to participate in your loyalty program

In order to earn massive, new registrations, make sure to promote your loyalty program so that customers are aware of it:

• One of the best ways to do this is to use your website for your loyalty program promotion, in the form of pop-ups, banners on the homepage, sidebars, etc. 
• Include loyalty program banners in your transaction emails like order confirmation emails, cart abandonment emails, or shipment emails.
• Send an announcement about your loyalty program to the existing customer data base via emails, text messages, etc, explaining the perks of it and offering sign-up incentives
• Charm the customers with attractive, irresistible rewards upfront to tempt them to sign up. This could include a free welcome gift, a coupon, or a percent off on their first purchase.

To encourage the customers to actively participate in your loyalty program, ensure creating exciting and a variety of rewards that are meaningful to the customers together with a dedicated program explainer page that clearly and concisely explains it. In addition, to level up the chances that your customer repeatedly engages with your program:

• Provide personalized offers that are valuable to them for example, a skincare brand can offer discounts on products that are specific to their skin type.
• Give rewards not just on the basis of how much the customer spends but also for other actions that are valuable to your business. This can include a review for a product (an important marketing tool), sharing the content of the brand’s social media (increasing brand awareness and trust), starting a trial, signing up for your newsletter (to keep your brand on top of their minds), etc
• Make sure your “points” are valuable and they are easy to earn and redeem
• A “free perks” program for the top tier customers or “VIP” customers (frequent and valuable buyers) which offers complimentery gifts for example.

Expanding High-Quality Customer Prospect Base with Referral Programs

A referral program rewards both the referring customer and the referred friend when the friend buys a product or a service. It is not only an effective means of improving customer retention but also, of generating new customers. Because a referral program incentivizes existing customers for referring the company’s products to a friend by offering attractive, meaningful rewards, they keep the customers engaged (boosting customer lifetime value and retention). 

On top of this, it is a natural word-of-mouth type of marketing strategy that reaches new and high-quality prospects. A customer is more likely to trust a friend’s recommendation or experience than even the best conventional advertisements. Why? Because the motives of a business are definitely hard to trust. In fact, stats suggest that the probability of a customer buying is FOUR TIMES higher when referred by a friend!

Thus, a referral program is a great scheme to strengthen relations with existing customers, increase brand awareness, build a good brand reputation, and produce more top-tier customers.

Email Marketing for Re-engagement

Email campaigns are a great and cost-effective way to regularly stay connected with customers and prospects. Email marketing helps you to educate customers about your specific products or services, and informs customers about any new product launches, upcoming or ongoing sales, exclusive offers, and other promos. 

Reminder emails can result in customers who are about to churn to reengage with your business by offering an incentive such as a discount code or a coupon to get the customer to be active again (thereby, helping reduce the churn rate). Such emails can also be about cart abandonment which reminds the customers of the products that they were interested in and can prompt them to purchase with effective copies like “Check out before the stock runs out!”

Up Sells, Cross Sells, and Down sells

A customer’s data and previous or current purchases can give you insight into products that would be relevant to a particular customer. 

Thus, when a customer decides to makes a purchase, product recommendations can be made which are a better, more upgraded, or premium version of their select item(s). This helps to increase the lifetime value of the customer and generate additional profits.

However, if the customer decides to not make a purchase, it is still possible to win them over by down selling which means offering a lower-cost but reasonable alternative (for example, via abandoned cart emails). This translates into being able to extract some value from the prospect than not earning anything at all.

Similarly, additional revenue can be generated by offering products or services that are related or complementary to their initial purchase for example a customer buying shoes can be suggested to buy a pair of socks or shoe shiners.

In a nutshell, a sustainable growth strategy involves a functional post purchase funnel which is vital to set your business up on a continuous, positive growth pattern.