6: Turning First-Time Customers Into Loyal Repeat Buyers

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickle. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode, we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we're here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. Today we are looking at turning first-time customers, so people who have shopped with you once, their first time shopping with you, into loyal repeat buyers. Why is this so important and amazing? Because it is so much cheaper to get a return customer than to get a new customer. And cheaper we're talking about in terms of effort, exposure, and money. So if we can get people who buy from us once to be so blown away and just amazed and excited over their experience that they want to come back and buy from us again. That, my friend, is the definition of winning in business.

All right, it's so much more predictable in terms of traffic when it comes to repeat buyers. They're on platforms, mainly email marketing is where you're going to get those repeat customers, without spoiling the whole podcast. But it's a reliable platform. You, you're, unless you You really say something controversial in your emails, your subscribers should stay around the same number-ish, and you should get a consistent click-through rate, and hopefully you raise that over time as well. Whereas things like social media is up and down, and it very often does a good— sometimes it's just algorithms and the way things are working.

And Scott from A World's Gonna Have a Big Impact on that.

And if you're running ads, they're like, costs change, you need new creative, you need your targeting, you like, there's a whole ton of work goes into that. The repeat traffic and email is, and I say this as an expert, so I'm probably wrong, but email I think is a little bit simpler.

You look at like, even to take it outside of the creative world, but just to give you like an example that everyone can relate to that was powerful here is, I'm sure you have a favorite restaurant. Or you have a place that you go to either weekly, monthly, I don't know, however often you go out to eat. In our case, there's a gyro truck 1 mile down the road, and he is our favorite. That is called a repeat customer. That is semi-reliable revenue. So if you look at it as like, say, a restaurant, because those are all one-time purchases, not a continuity program, then it's pretty easy to understand. Like, they might have had to spend money on advertising or location or whatnot to get you in the door the first time. But if you love the food, you're going to keep coming back. So make sure people love your food.

So the first one we're going to do is providing an exceptional first purchase experience. When someone new comes into your business, you want that first purchase and the experience that someone has to set the tone for the relationship over the next week, month, year, decade. You want to blow them out the water, give them a really great experience in every like touchpoint that you have, the emails that they get. Their purchase, checking out their experience, making the purchase, the shipping experience, actually receiving it, and how fast they get it, how reliable is their good options. Even the packaging comes into it. Having a handwritten note in there, all those things we spoke about a couple of episodes ago, how you follow up with them afterwards, asking for a review is another touchpoint. You want the reviews for your own self, but that just following up with them and asking how things went and how can be a really great touchpoint and gives them a great experience because you look like you care, which you should care. It is showing that you care in, you know, all of those different touchpoints along the journey. You want to be as good as possible because if one lets you down, it can ruin the whole experience and they just never come back. The thing of restaurants, the first time you go to a restaurant, you leave and come home and you have food poisoning. Even if that's the only time you ever give anyone food poisoning in their entire time being in a restaurant, you're not gonna go back there. You're not gonna give them a second shot.

There's a restaurant that I absolutely love in the next town and they have gelato. So we get gelato flight and I have raved about it and raved about it and raved about it. And then one day my mom was in town and she's like, oh, Melissa's always talking about this place. Let's stop and eat. And they had new staff in and they had changed up their menu. They had changed up their ordering process so you could order on the app, which is not something we really like when we're in a restaurant. And the food that came out from a new cook was absolutely horrible. So it doesn't matter how much I rave about that business and the gelato and all the good things that I have, because she ordered something that I had never gotten on the menu before. She will never, ever, ever go back. Don't fall down on the first experience. You don't get another option here, another chance, usually, unless you're the only person who sells this very necessary, useful, must-be-had item. Then they're forced to it, but they don't like you.

But you're actively seeking alternatives, like there's places— if I didn't have to send my stuff with the Royal Mail, I absolutely would not. They have had a lot of horrible experiences with them and had to quite go in with someone else. Like cost and reliability, they're— everything's either much more expensive or even less reliable, which is hard to believe.

The biggest thing here with touchpoints though, especially, is shipping expectations and getting that order out either on time or early. If you need to set padding within your shipping time, then do it. One of the worst things is someone who orders and then it takes forever for the item to come. That is going to automatically preset them to not be happy and not want to come back. So timely shipping, making sure that your product descriptions— like, don't lie to your people. Make the colors— make sure the colors represent what the thing really is. Make sure the sizing represents what the thing really is. Don't be like, oh, I ordered lightsabers. I forgot what it was. It was off a Facebook ad and a friend found it because we were looking, we wanted lightsabers to duel, but we wanted nice ones, not like the cheap ones you get at the dollar store or at Walmart and whatnot. And we went through this whole like sales page and like we were really nitpicking it apart and these looked like awesome lightsabers and the price was pretty good. And then they had like a buy 2 for 30-something bucks or maybe it was more. I don't remember. I want to say I spent spent close to $100 to get 4 lightsabers, which looked like they were going to be pretty decent. I have a habit of breaking the cheap ones. So place the order, so excited, takes forever to come in. Finally something comes and arrives. It's— oh, by the way, it's like they shared pictures of a warehouse, they had videos of people lighting up these lightsabers and they were so awesome and showing them doing battle and everything else. Zittek. Every— zittek was a lie. I get this package on the front porch and it's small and it's wrapped and it's from China. It still had the international shipping labels and everything on it. I'm like, oh boy, what the hell is this? I open it up and it is the equivalent to dollar store lightsabers. It is the kind that you flick and they slide apart. You couldn't get the compartments open to put the batteries in. When you do get it, the thing won't close back down. And I was so outraged, I didn't even think to fight the pricing claim on it and maybe get my money back. I was a dumb consumer at that point. So I was like, oh, I'll give 'em to my nephew and then we duel and they're so cheap that I will slash with my good lightsaber and break his and it's a crying fest. Yeah. So this is just bad experiences all around.

It can be tempting to, especially when it comes to shipping, to say, oh yeah, you can have this next day, but if you're never gonna do that. That takes some balls. Even if you say, yeah, this is gonna take 5 days, which is slow and it's not quite attractive, but if you always meet that 5 days, people are gonna be happier than if you constantly fail to do next day delivery.

Or if you're gonna ship out in 5 and you're able to do it in 3, but you have 5 for padding, people can be even more excited. Having that like Shopify delivery time or ship out time.

Either or, but like Shopify will give you a range of when it'll be delivered, and if you meet that, I'm happy enough. Sometimes it being early can also annoy me because I'll look and I'll be like, okay, this thing says it's definitely not coming today. I can go out. And then it arrives early and I miss it. That also annoys me. Setting and meeting expectations is what I like. If it's through the letterbox, I don't care, just send it fast. But if it's something I have to answer the door for, it gives me an active temper.

Yeah, they just leave stuff on our porch.

And then they send it back to the place and then they take days to deliver it. I can go there, but it's open from 8 till 8:01 on the second Thursday of the month, but only if it's a full moon. It's too ad hoc.

We have a couple of salons in our area that have timing scheduled like that. I especially enjoy the full moon part. That, that, that I didn't put that in the equation. That is so true. Okay, so you guys got the deal here on having that wonderful initial experience. So let's move on to the next part, which is once they got the thing and they're all excited about the thing, you wanna keep that momentum. Going, and the easiest way to do that is through follow-up post-purchase email. Yes?

Yeah, which is something I swear a lot. I have a whole template pack, which I almost have a whole even improved template pack that does even more coming soon. So I talk about this a lot, and I spoke about it a little bit in the last one, but having a set of emails that really take someone through the experience. And post-purchase, it's not just after they've received it, it's the in-between when they hit 'Pay now,' and it arrives to them. You can help build up some expectations. When's it going to be delivered? When— letting them know when it's shipped out. If it's something that has some sort of education around it, giving them those emails in that sequence. If you sell— it's going to be hard to get a large product range without building 100 different sequences. If you, say, sell digital templates, and they're all in Canva. Giving someone a set of instructions like, here's how you make a Canva account, here's how you change text, here's how you change fonts and colors, just simple things like that in a nice sequence will make that really easy for someone and builds a nice kind of experience for them. Having some follow-up emails with those instructions will help make sure that they get the good of it. Having an email that asks for reviews If you don't just say, hey, leave me a review, you actually say, hey, it's Andrew, I'm following up on your recent purchase. Did it go well? Have you received this? If you have any problems, just reach out and let me know. Oh, and if you love it, could you leave a review? That you're leading up front with asking how they do and offering to solve any issues. That helps build a relationship and some expectations in their mind because you look like someone who genuinely cares in their purchase and wants to make sure that they're getting a really good experience with you. And even doing things like upselling your next emails, even if you're like, okay, you bought the thing, but there's another item that would go really well with this. Or now that you have this, would also be useful. If you write that email in a really good way where you're helping someone, you are letting them know that this genuinely would help them. That also builds a really great experience and it also gets some purchasing in there. There's benefits, there's multiple benefits there. Restock emails. If you sell soap and okay, the soap lasts around a month, let's say in a month's time you say, hey Melissa, looks like you're going to be running out of soap pretty soon. Is it time you repurchased?

It's how— because no one wants to deal with that day that you have that itty bitty scrap of soap left and you're scrubbing it on the washcloth to see if you can get any suds out of it and it's your favorite soap and your skin loves it and it smells so good. I don't want anyone to have to go through that kind of struggle right there. So why don't you reorder now so when it gets that little stubby, like, flint of a piece left, you have a whole new bar ready to go?

And you'd even be like, oh hey, what's that? You bought this 2 months in a row. What if you set up a subscription for this? That's a must.

There's a certain shit bar that I wish would do that. Hint hint, wink wink.

Shoot, listen. Yeah, and if you're using a platform like Shopify, really easy to implement. It keeps top of mind, it lets them know that you care and you are genuinely helping them. It's not just salesy. All of those things really do help someone have a great experience and it turns them into repeat customers. The next way we do this is building loyalty through personalization. And I feel like I talk about this a lot, but email is the way I like to do this. There's so much personalization that you can offer with your emails.

You didn't catch it ahead of time?

Yeah, there's so much personalization that can easily be done with email, especially if you're using a platform that integrates with the e-commerce platform that you're using. I use Shopify. Klaviyo does this the best. It has all that customer data, it's constantly collecting it. It knows every time they visit your site, every time they've abandoned cart, every time they've made a purchase, what they've purchased. How far there is between those purchases, are they opening your emails, are they clicking through, and you can use all that data to send them personalized emails. It knows what they've been looking at, so when you send them an email, you can say, hey, here's some recommendations based on what you actually buy and what you actually look at when you're on the site. It even has, like, it doesn't specifically ask this, but guesses if they're male or female. If you sell clothes, you're not sending me pictures of dresses because I'm never going to buy them. Even if it's like, it's not going to be perfect. But using things like that in your emails, it makes it personalized. And I'm so much more likely to purchase when you send me the right stuff. I get some clothes companies all the time and other things like that. And I get emails from them and most of the time it's men's wear, but sometimes it's women's wear and I'm like, okay, delete. I'm not going to buy this. I don't randomly buy dresses for people. Don't send it to me.

New hoodies, that would have been so much better.

Even sending things like birthday emails where you get a sort of discount, it makes them feel really special. The anniversary of the date they first made a purchase. Taking your most loyal customers and sending them specific emails, putting them in a little segment of people and giving them a specific offer. Things like Black Friday is coming up, you give them early access. There's so many ways to add personalization and it builds loyalty because you're sending them really relevant, tailored stuff to them. Makes them feel more valued and it makes them way more likely to make a purchase. So the next way we do this is encourage loyalty with incentives. These are ways to give people a reason to keep coming back.

Reward repeat purchases. So if you give them Someone who has already bought from you is now likely— has a higher chance of buying from you again, as long as you didn't screw it in the beginning. So give them reasons. Sometimes people just need a reason to shop, a reason to come back. So you could do things like VIP customer days, customer appreciation sales, any of that kind of thing are phenomenal for getting people to come on back. Or just, you know, let them know about other sales going on. So you can do incentives, you can do loyalty points. So loyalty programs are phenomenal for this, for getting people to come back and back and back.

Yeah, a few months ago—

that's your beast, loyalty programs.

Yeah, a few months ago with some of our private clients, we worked on building loyalty schemes into their websites. So we've been testing those out and looking at all the different ways you can reward people with points, getting them to visit your website again and again. Anniversary, always the main approach. This is a really good reason to give someone points. And they start to build up those points and they keep coming back. We've dug into this really deep on another episode of the podcast. And they can also unlock other things. It doesn't necessarily have to be a money-off voucher. It can be a free shipping voucher if you don't normally offer that. They can use points to unlock early access to a sale.

I was going to say, an easy way to think about this that maybe a lot of people know is like, credit card tiers or like hotel tiers where they'll have— you're a base member or a reward member, and then maybe you get bronze or silver and then gold and platinum and all of those, like level up, level up, level up. What is it? The loyalty program. It proves if you're a top tier person at Bonvoy, if it means you spent a lot of money with Marriott, it's a loyalty program. And I have friends who will go and take the expensive Marriott hotel over the cheap hotel because they don't want to lose their gold status. Sorry, Johnna. But that's like an outside of e-com experience. But it's so true on here. How many people— if you are a jewelry maker, you are probably aware of Fire Mountain Gems. They have tiers. Most people look at it, they just have discount levels for how much you're buying, but they also have tiers that get you extra level discounts. I see this a lot in suppliers. That's where I pay attention the most. But loyalty programs, we talked about it before. Kohl's and Kohl's Cash is a loyalty program. The more you spend, the more reward you get, which is a great thing here. But as Andrew said, it doesn't just have to be discounts. It could be gifts. It could be shipping vouchers. It could be extra level behind the scenes thing. It could be, I've never understood this one, but apparently it does work. Like if you were to combine loyalty program with community, it could be certain badges, certain statuses that people have. Like that works too. It could be a really great easy one on there is if they're at a certain level or they reach a certain number of reward points, their orders get processed first. They get to skip the line.

Look at any airline. They all have a scheme with different levels and Like people will go out of their way to spend money on flights so they can get the points to use for something else. And airlines do all sorts of weird things. They're like UK domestic flights. The UK isn't huge. Aberdeen is really far north, London's very far south. That's one of the longest domestic routes. It's an hour and a half. You go up and you're down. If you get a good tailwind, it's closer to an hour. And A couple years ago, they started, they have business class right now where it's 2 rows of 3 on those flights. They put a weird table thing in the middle seat so you get a seat to yourself and then a space for another person. And they serve a cold meal, which I don't know how you could possibly eat that in the amount of time, cuz they must get up, here's your food. Okay, we need to clean this way.

Bye. There's a mastermind program that I'm part of and I go to events with them and they offer now VIP. I think I've done the VIP every time I've gone to hang out with them, mostly because I like who you get to meet and hang out with at the dinner. It's more of a what room are you in than anything else. But now if you're VIP, they started the last time, the last one I went to, second to last one, that the front section of table are reserved for VIP. And I'm always like, hahaha, I get to be in the front section, I have the fancy pants. I get annoyed if I go to a place, it's like, wait, there was a fancy pass. Why do I not have the fancy pass? I want the exclusive stuff. If you offer perks, like they will, you can always go into ChatGPT and be like, I wanna start a rewards program. Bitch, this is my market. This is what I sell. Give me ideas for what we can offer.

Yeah. And you can even include your tech stack. You say, okay, I use Shopify and Klaviyo. Mm-hmm. And like, it will incorporate the tech you have and offer suggestions for you. A plugin that would work to connect both and share a lot of data. The last way we turn our first-time customers into repeat buyers is by maintaining excellent customer service.

You have to have great customer service.

And then it sometimes, it takes a lot of being the bigger person and responding nicely. Sometimes it takes, "Hey Chat, write this response for me, 'cause I'm gonna put out my computer." I've saved responses that have the nice way to say things, because if I wrote them myself, It wouldn't be so nice. Sometimes it's okay. I do need a couple of hours to get the initial anger out of my head so I can respond in a rational kind of manner when I'm not quite as angry.

I rage, yes. Be careful with the time delay thing because sometimes you're just allowing yourself and the customer to sit and stew with their anger. And I'm gonna suggest going to the chat route, 'cause sometimes I get so pissed off at them. That I wait a full 24 hours and then occasionally I'd forget about them. Oh, right. Then they get really, really mad and I get really, really mad at them and now at myself too. So I'm going to stress, like, if you could do it, maybe this is, you have a VA, you have a relative, you have a child, you have a somebody else who puts the thing into ChatGPT to get the response that is or is not approved by you and goes out. Could be a better option cuz sometimes the time delay just like bites me in the butt.

Yeah, I know I need it cuz I've even chatted ChatGPT before and I'm like, okay, say this, but say it angrier. Don't be this nice. Like I'll even say to ChatGPT, like, this is too nice to this person. You need to change it. Like, I need that time to cool down.

We need it to be—

because yeah, I want to send the horrible email.

So yeah, sponsor—

listen, people are making me feel embarrassed for their comment, but Respond quickly, proactively addressing the concerns. If you see something going wrong and you can solve it, reaching out to them. If you, it was someone this week, I do personalized stuff, one of our clients does. If you see something that looks like a mistake, instead of letting them spend money and then getting angry at you and blaming you and having to ask for more and all this stuff, reach out and be like, okay, I think this is wrong. Really creates a great experience for them. And following up and making sure that things did go wrong. When you've reached out to someone. A great experience I had when I bought the machine I use to French lance everything, my Richelieu broke and I bought a new one. And when I first bought it, they had this upgrade pack thing that I bought a couple of months later. So when I bought the new one, I bought the thing in the upgrade pack. And like pretty much immediately after I checked out, they were fast, I got a phone call. Hey, this is now included with this machine. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to refund this for you. And I'm packing the machine now and you'll have it tomorrow. Like they were insanely good.

So that's the first person you're gonna look at if you need a machine.

Like totally go back there, leave Jake to view. I had a really great experience because they were proactive and paying attention, like really paying attention. And it was actually, it wasn't the place I was gonna go to first. The initial place I went to, they phoned too, but it was because, oh, you live in Aberdeen, which Third biggest city in Scotland. Not like, there's Inverness and stuff is further north. Ooh, that's like, that's not mainland. I don't know what, we're not on an island, we're attached to England. That's not, that's like the Highlands, which no, we're not in the Highlands. They're like, ooh, that might cost more money. And even if we can stay in there, we're like, we're gonna have to look, I'll cancel the order, forget it. I'm like, you're gonna be like this? Like, it was thousands of pounds. I'm like, I'm not, I don't want to waste my time on you, refunded. It was really opposite ends in terms of service. I had bought other smaller things in the past, like refills and things, efrith, and I've never gone back since, 'cause they were really crappy. I know, like, there's only one company that really delivers big stuff like that, that they use. It's always DPD. They ship so much stuff. I know that they will deliver here next day. I know that they don't charge extra to do it. We're not You don't count as a special zone if you're on Orkney or some of those islands, that's more difficult. But Aberdeen is not one of those places. They have a giant depot here because there's thousands of parcels a day coming to Aberdeen. It's insane that they were doing this. It really, having that other experience at the opposite end really helped. And you can even turn negative experiences into positive ones when people reach out to you and they're like, this thing hasn't arrived, and you solve that problem and you do it really quickly. Sometimes it creates an experience. I know I have, I've had people who will come to me, I will do their thing, they'll get it really quickly. They never have to contact me. They have a great experience. But like, it's not super memorable because it just all went smoothly. But there are people where sometimes there's a hiccup and then we start an email conversation, we go back and forth and they're like, oh, thank you. Sometimes things go wrong. It starts like this experience. And people feel really supported.

Sometimes that makes them negative fans.

Yeah, I help them really well and they like, sometimes the people who, and it's fairly my fault, I will say that, normally it's something to do with the raw milk, but if I solve their problem, they'll like me even more. So you can turn those negative experiences into positive ones by giving them a really great experience when it comes to customer support. Okay, so today we covered 5 strategies to turn your first-time customers into repeat buyers. Creating a great first impression, following up post-purchase, give them a personalized experience, offering incentives, and delivering excellent customer service. Try and plan at least one of these strategies and share your results with us in our Facebook community.

And if you need sales to be able to start trying these, if you're struggling with that, then definitely check out this resource that we have for you, where you can get, we call it a flash sale in a snap, where you can get a flash sale literally up and running this weekend. So that way you can create those great first impressions and get all of this loyalty stuff moving right along. You can grab it at theproductgrowthlab.com/flash.

Thanks for tuning in to the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support.

Until next time, keep growing and creating.

This is Brad Gross Lab signing off.