Remember the statistic that 74% of clients make only one purchase? This statistic demonstrates how poorly most brands handle the after-sale experience.
It’s understandable that 74% of customers only make one purchase from an online retailer given that millions of them offer a bad post-purchase experience. Yet, I blame the marketers rather than the customer service, who are often forced into a relationship they are unaware of or unwilling to commit to. And I’m participating in the finger-pointing as a marketer. There is a better approach.
The funnel idea is to blame for the entire blame game. Customers are either at the top, middle, or bottom of the sales funnel, which is not a particularly appealing position from the customer’s perspective. Nonetheless, marketers must make some reference to the customer’s purchasing phases, I suppose.
The issue with the funnel is that it only has one goal for marketers: to convert subscribers into consumers at the bottom of the funnel.
To thrive in e-commerce, you must understand that the funnel is obsolete. The flywheel is the only practical strategy for bringing in new consumers, converting them, and increasing their loyalty and spending power.
A flywheel-based marketing strategy provides you with a continuous path to developing customer lifetime value and acquiring like-minded high-value consumers instead of focusing on funnel-based marketing, which results in a lot of one-time buys.
It can offer more immediate value to your brand by focusing on the very first opportunity to win over those one-time buyers: the post-purchase experience. Rather than going into all the nuances of an overarching flywheel-based marketing approach to your business, this will help you grow more quickly.
You will succeed at 80% of your attempts to increase client lifetime value by concentrating on the customer experience immediately following the sale—the 20% effort. The four phases of the post-purchase hourglass will be discussed in my next blog post.