Brand: all the associations people have about your company. Every touchpoint and experience gets factored into a customer’s impression of your company. Put simply, brand is the reason people drink Diet Coke instead of Diet Rite. What’s Diet Rite, you ask? Exactly.
Shipping and delivery are branding opportunities that many brands overlook. However, a branded post-purchase experience is a huge competitive advantage in eCommerce. Among Gen Z, more than one in three (36%) online shoppers say branded shipping enhances the customer experience. That rush of goodwill that arises when buyers open your package? When they see their order is en route and on time? All that happiness gets channelled directly into your brand.
Today we highlight Easyship’s Post-Purchase Branding Suite. This powerful automated toolkit lets you harness all the good vibes from every post-purchase touchpoint. As a result, you’ll see customer retention and repeat purchasing increase. Meanwhile, your brand image is growing steadily all the time.
Use this guide to learn about Easyship’s Post-Purchase Branding Suite, best practices for branding, as well as four case studies that show how these features help you win at branding.
5 Branding Best Practices for eCommerce
The best way to grow your best brand is to show customers what you’re made of. Here are a handful of best practices to get you moving in the right direction.
1. Service your customers: What better time to gain a loyal customer than when they’re in need? In this spirit, you should think of shipping is a form of customer service. Deliver on your promise for a timely, well-supported fulfillment experience customers and they’ll stick with you.
2. Tell your story: Are you caring? Fun? Reliable? Use your marketing materials to share your brand personality. From email to social to packaging, the best brands are great products with a distinct personality.
3. Be honest: People expect their favorite brands to be genuine and transparent. When it comes to shipping, people value cost transparency. This means it’s important to announce your shipping and returns policy on your website, checkout page, then send order status emails that inform buyers about returns plus updates on delivery status.
4. Niche down: Your brand only needs to be relevant to your target audience. In other words, you can forget about everyone else. Be yourself and your tribe will appear. From the social causes you champion to your messaging style, having a unique brand style is irreplaceable when it comes to gaining an audience.
5. Adjust as needed: Your brand evolves alongside your company. Experiment with different branding strategies and messaging styles to find your lane. Tweaking your brand experience, from web copy to delivery options, are the details that sum to a great brand when experienced organically.
Now let’s highlight four use cases for branding your shipping experience with Easyship.
1. Branded Outreach Capitalizes On Fulfillment Success
Every time you come in contact with your customer is a chance to grow your brand. With Easyship, you can automatically add your logo to every touchpoint along the post-purchase experience, including:
- Post-purchase emails
- Dedicated tracking pages
- Landing pages
- Packing slips (seen below)
With your logo added, a packing slip is more than just a proof of purchase. It's a colorful reminder that your brand delivered on its promise.
Branded packaging is proven to grow your brand, according to a psychological principle called The Picture Superiority Effect. Turns out, we’re more likely to remember words with pictures than just words by themselves.
From shipment status emails to unboxing, your logo is a potent visual cue. Leaving your mark is a great way to stay top of mind with shoppers in the days ahead.
Pro Tip: Plant a Lot of Seeds
Every touchpoint is a chance to win over your customer. Problem is, there’s no way of knowing which interaction will tip customers from neutrality to loyalty. The foolproof way to win at branding is to create repeat scenarios in which customers can take a shine to you.
2. Automated Emails Capitalize On Updates
Frequent shipment updates are a surefire way to link your brand with positive feels. After all, 83% of people say they want brands to share tracking information with them.
Doing so makes it clear to customers that they can trust you. Conversely, this helps you avoid any negative associations with delivery delays or disappointment.
With Easyship, you can send automated branded email updates at every stage of the post-purchase experience, including:
- Order received
- Order shipped
- Delivery delays
- Tracking information
Here’s what an automated tracking email looks like.
Our email notifications are templated with all relevant shipping information like the tracking number, courier info, and the shipping address. This way, customers are relieved to see that their order will be delivered as expected. You can also personalize the message copy and the preferred method of contact if customers have concerns.
As the bearer of good news, you get the credit when things go right. On the flip side, updating customers is the best way to defuse any ‘where’s my package?’ anxiety that might arise before an otherwise delightful delivery.
Best of all: these shipping notifications update automatically based on data from the courier website. This means customers can refer back to their email for real-time status updates on their order, no matter where it is.
Pro Tip: Use the Contact Us Section
It’s important to be responsive to customer queries about shipment status. A bungled delivery can lose you a customer, and worse, may result in negative feedback being shared on social media.
To safeguard customer loyalty, make good use of the “Contact Us” section in automated Easyship emails. Do you use email for support? Social media? The phone? Adjust this section to reflect the best way for customers to get in touch. This way, you can resolve any brand-negative issues with a swiftness.
3. Dedicated Tracking Pages Put Shoppers At Ease
Most online shoppers track packages, if only to remind themselves of the delivery date. That swelling of reassurance people get when they see their package is safely en route – you want to capitalize on that.
With Easyship, all your tracking links point shoppers to a professionally-designed branded tracking page.
Every Easyship tracking page offers up the real-time tracking information from the selected courier. Dazzling shoppers with a polished, seamless tracking experience makes your brand stand out in a big way. Why? Well, because nobody likes being redirected to the clunky USPS site, then clicking multiple links to see the order status.
With Easyship, your buyers get 100% visibility of their order in a single click on a beautiful, professional-designed page.
This shows customers that you’re going the extra mile to make sure their shipment is a success. Even if things are awry, your buyers are way happier to handle the tracking process on this page than on the clunky courier site. If all goes well, you’ve differentiated your brand on a touchpoint that every customer uses.
Pro Tip: Drive Results With Customized Tracking Pages
You want your customer outreach to serve multiple purposes. This is why Easyship tracking pages can be customized to your needs. Have a sale you want to promote? Promoting a customer loyalty program? Have new products in stock? As seen above, your Easyship tracking page can be customized to fit your needs.
Use the banner space below the tracking details to maximize your next marketing initiative. After the sale, customers are full of goodwill. Use this interface to drive retention and loyalty among your newest customers.
4. Automatic Inventory Updates Ensure Happy Outcomes
Our branding suite is designed to help customers take a shine to you in the late stages of the customer journey. Those moments when customers are flush with positive emotion like anticipation and happiness, you want to remind people that you made that moment possible.
As much as branding about favorable positioning, it’s also about avoiding negative associations. For example, disappointing shoppers by selling them items you don't have in stock.
Easyship automatically updates all fulfilled shipments in your store inventory in real-time. Because disappointing customers is the opposite of branding building.
Your brand sits at the intersection of product and personality. You want to be known as reliable and trustworthy, not flaky and frustrating. Using our branding suite automatically makes sure your orders update in inventory automatically, so your brand always puts its best foot forward.
Easyship’s Branding Suite
Post-purchase is a delicate time for online brands. Uncertainties abound around shipping and fulfillment, most of which is out of your control. And only if things go well can you reasonably expect a return customer.
With Easyship’s branding suite, you grow your brand at every step of the customer journey. Since many brands forget this stage, you can make serious strides in the customer acquisition and retention department. This is because branded materials are subtle cues that can significantly add to the bottom line over time.
Ready to try our Branding Suite for greater sales and brand awareness? Create your Easyship account today. It’s free for any merchant sending less than 100 orders per month.