Well designed order confirmation emails provide you with a great opportunity to nurture new customers into habitual repeat buyers and immediately make a good impression – something we definitely encourage here at Ecommerce Intelligence. This is the first step to getting more loyal customers, right from the moment you say “thank you for shopping with us”.
So if increasing customer loyalty and average lifetime value is important to your online store (spoiler alert: it should be), a well-crafted thank you for your purchase email template is a the first place to start.
Let’s take a look at the core elements of winning thank you email templates, which play an important role in your wider Ecommerce email strategy.
Here’s what we’ll be covering in this detailed Ecommerce thank you email guide:
The Basics: Thank You For Your Order Confirmation Emails
Before we get into the fun stuff, it’s absolutely essential that an automated thank you email does exactly what you’d expect it to: confirms your customer’s order and pricing, and tells them when they can expect it to arrive.
Before you get into talking about your loyalty program, latest exclusive deals, or some other call to action, make sure you get the thank you email template basics right. Keep the subject line simple too.
Here’s an excellent post purchase email example from Amazon:
It’s direct, to the point, and filled with vital information, including the arrival date, order number, and shipment total. Simple subject line ideas would be “Your order confirmation” or something along those lines for the initial order confirmation receipt, with your company name as the sender.
It even includes a link to tracking information, making it that much easier to track the package. All of these little things are important for customer satisfaction and encouraging future purchases.
In today’s competitive Ecommerce market this is the absolute minimum expected after a customer buys.
Many brands are also now sending secondary automated thank you for your order messages after this initial “receipt” type message, with more of a branding and feel good focused thank you note to really welcome a new customer and showing gratitude.
We’ll discuss these more later as they’re key to building customer satisfaction early on.
Upselling & Cross Selling In Post Purchase Thank You Email Templates
As you might expect, the world’s leading Ecommerce site doesn’t generate billions of dollars in sales each year by only selling one item to each customer. Amazon relies on repeat customers more than any other brand and has configured its post purchase thank you messages accordingly.
Take a look at the bottom of this order confirmation email to see the steps taken to further upsell related products right after a customer’s most recent purchase.
This simple addition to a thank you email template is incredibly powerful. Amazon knows the product you just bought and is using that information to recommend other items you’re likely to be interested in purchasing.
By taking the time to configure this, they’re greatly increasing the likelihood of you making an additional purchase of a product you might not have ever discovered on your own. This is a great way to serve customers from right inside your thank you email template while increasing sales for your online business. It’s easy to do using free templates inside of your ESP.
While your Ecommerce store will not have the same number of complementary products Amazon has to offer its customers, you can still replicate this upsell/cross-sell in your own order confirmation email.
Incentivizing Repeat Purchasing in Automated Thank You For Your Order Emails
While including links to related products is a great way to encourage repeat purchases, incentivizing these offers can help take the performance of your automated thank you emails to the next level and generate more loyal customers. This is a big focus for us in the Ecommerce email marketing agency services we deliver for clients.
Purchasers, and especially first time customers, are already riding the high from buying – why not take advantage of this good will by giving them a time-sensitive offer with a coupon code or a surprise gift?
You can do this to encourage their next purchase in your next email following the immediate purchase receipt notification message.
There are a number of pre-built Klaviyo thank you message templates that make thanking customers and getting that all important repeat purchase as smooth as possible.
Below is one of their thank you for your purchase email template examples. This is obviously just a template and will need to be re-designed and branded for your store, but all the important elements are there.
This thank you/cross-sell template is for stores who are still sending the automatic order confirmation notices from Shopify itself, rather than Klaviyo.
Otherwise the product info would be in the Klaviyo email.
This post purchase email is short, sweet, and extremely targeted: this particular email is only configured to send out to customers who have just made their first purchase. A repeat customer could get something different.
By taking advantage of the Klaviyo platform’s various filtering mechanisms, you can customize your thank you emails based on where the recipient is in their customer journey.
You don’t need to send a coupon code every time someone makes a purchase (and probably shouldn’t to existing customers avoid conditioning people to only purchase at a discount), but for first-time buyers this can be an incredibly powerful way to generate additional sales with ease.
Generating Customer Reviews in Your Thank You Email Series
Another way to further leverage post purchase emails is by employing them to get product reviews on your Ecommerce store.
The importance of having an abundance of positive reviews on your Ecommerce site cannot be overstated:
- 93% of customers consult reviews before they make a purchase (Qualtrics)
- 63% of purchasers are more likely to purchase from a site that has reviews on it (Shopify)
- Up to 79% of customers trust product reviews as much as personal recommendations (Shopify)
There’s no getting around it: your Ecommerce store needs reviews – they’re almost like word of mouth marketing but online. Automated post purchase email sequences are a great way to generate them. Asking for a review shortly after a customer is expected to have received their products is usually the best timing.
Here’s how you might set up a triggered flow email in Klaviyo:
It’s important to note the timing delay being utilized here. Klaviyo has set this “Thank you for your purchase” template to send out 14 days after the order in question has been fulfilled.
Why?
To prevent customers who have not yet received their order from receiving an email prompting them to review it.
While this probably seems trivial, it’s very important to keep in mind when you’re configuring your own post purchase emails in Shopify or another online store platform.
You always, always, always want your emails to be relevant to your recipients. Taking the time to make sure your campaign filters are set correctly is a great way to ensure that they are.
Additional Content Ideas For Your Thank You Notes
Your business is unique.
Your brand’s Thank you for your order emails and post purchase flows should be as well.
These are some of your best opportunities to build customer relationships, so don’t rush this part of your overall email marketing strategy. Make sure you’re showing gratitude and introducing your brand’s unique voice and personality.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a successful post-purchase email series, and while the ideas presented above will work for most businesses, you can always build on them to further benefit your company.
For example…
Do you frequently get questions about how to best store, care for, or utilize your product? Consider including answers to these FAQs within your post purchase email campaign.
Your customers will appreciate this vital information and it will go a long way in making sure they get the most out of their recent order, and want to make future purchases. All of these little steps are what help you create a long lasting positive impression and build customer satisfaction over time.
Or maybe you have an amazing customer loyalty program and you want all of your first time buyers to know all about the benefits. A same-day thank you note is a great place to mention it.
Putting The Thank Your For Your Order Email Templates Together in a Series
As you’ve been reading this guide, you’ve likely thought back on some of the order confirmation emails you’ve received yourself. While you’ve undoubtedly seen some of these various elements in them, it’s highly unlikely that any one email contained every single one.
There’s a good reason for that: the best thank you email isn’t just one email, it’s a series of them.
Before you begin worrying about annoying your purchasers into unsubscribing from your list altogether, please know that we’re not advising you send every single purchaser a 10-email series.
We’re instead recommending that you use some smart automating to ensure your post-purchase thank you emails hit their goals without frustrating your subscriber base. This will be a semi personalized thank you for your purchase email sequence.
The best way to accomplish this is by splitting your order confirmation emails up into a variety of different campaigns that each serve a specific purchase.
Every single customer who purchases from your store should receive a follow-up email confirming their order and letting them know when to expect it, and it should look and sound inviting. The same goes for shipping confirmation emails, and potentially “order delivered” messages too if your tech stack supports it.
Not every customer should receive an email asking for a product review, offering a discount coupon for the next purchase though.
This is easily illustrated by Klaviyo’s post purchase thank you emails, all of which are pre-built into the platform.
As you can see, rather than cluttering up a single post purchase email campaign with endless emails, Klaviyo has instead chosen to break them into separate campaigns that target different user types and behaviors.
The upsell flow (“Post-Purchase Bounce Back”) triggers a discount email to send after purchase – but only to first-time buyers.
This is an excellent bit of filtering because it allows you to restrict your special offers to the subscribers most likely to need them to make another purchase: new customers.
You don’t want to overdo discount offers because it cheapens your brand and conditions people to not pay full price for your products. Limiting this particular offer to one specific segment of your user base helps protect against this. Some stores will choose to not use this strategy at all if it’s not on-brand for them.
Moving on to Klaviyo’s Product Review/Cross Sell flow, we can see they believe it’s best to only send one product review email in a short period of time, regardless of the total number of purchases placed.
To illustrate how these campaign triggers and filters work, let’s consider an example:
Person A places an order on December 1st. The order is fulfilled the same day, causing them to enter into this automated campaign. If they don’t fulfill another order within two weeks, they’ll receive an email prompting them to leave a review of their product 14 days after their order has been fulfilled.
If they do fulfill another order in this period of time, they won’t receive an email 14 days from the date their first order was fulfilled, but – assuming they don’t fulfill yet another order – they will receive an email 14 days from the date the second order was placed, prompting a review for that item.
It’s easy to see why this is beneficial.
Without these rules in place, a subscriber could theoretically receive a product review email on the 14th for an order placed on the 1st, then another review email on the 15th for an order placed on the 2nd, etc. This would get incredibly annoying and would likely result in them either unsubscribing from your emails or leaving a negative review out of frustration.
Instead, Klaviyo accounts for this by ensuring only one product review email is received in a given period of time after a recent purchase. They also make sure that the automated thank you email is timely by waiting 14 days from the fulfillment date before sending it.
This gives the customer time to use the product and form an opinion on it before being asked to leave a review of it. Learn more about Klaviyo’s powerful rules, filters and automations in our detailed Klaviyo platform review here.
You can apply the logic used in these two example emails to any post purchase thank you email templates you want to create.
It’s okay if your first order confirmation email includes more than just bare bones order tracking information – you can follow Amazon’s lead and recommend complementary products, ask for social follows, or both – but the more complex and specific your goals get, the better served you’ll be by breaking them into individual campaigns.
Take a look at the post purchase email examples below, along with some from your favorite online stores and then get to work crafting a winning thank you email flow of your very own.
Thank You Email Template Examples from Smart Ecommerce Brands
If you need a little inspiration for your own thank you notes and follow up emails, these template examples could be helpful.
Aloha Post Purchase Thank You For Your Order Email (Order Receipt)
This is a great thank you note template example of an immediate order receipt delivered as soon as payment is made on your website.
You don’t want to be marketing or selling here, just giving people what they expect to see and maybe taking a sentence to express gratitude. This keeps customers happy and lets them know everything is in order with their purchase.
This thank you email template for the order receipt can be delivered either directly from Shopify, or from your own email service provider such as Klaviyo, OmniSend, etc.
Tommy John Post Purchase Email Example (Shipping Confirmation)
Your standard shipping confirmation email template done right.
All the information needed is nicely presented in a branded but clean looking email. The brand benefits and USPs in graphic icons at the bottom are a nice touch. Adding these throughout your email marketing strategy across all templates keeps customers feeling good about shopping with your brand, and adds to their confidence around making future purchases.
The only potential addition to this template would be a few words for a personalized thank you note with the customer name. Especially for first time customers.
Boll & Branch Thank You Email (Advanced Order Receipt)
This is a more advanced order thank you for your order email template from Boll & Branch. Not only does the customer get all of the info they need, but a completely branded experience. They know exactly what to expect in the near future, and after the order information is shown the rest of the email focuses on USPs and brand/product benefits.
Purchasers are also made aware they can expect continuous support and exactly how to get customer service. This is a fantastic post purchase automated email template!
If you want to deliver a premium experience and then take some hints from this example for your own thank you emails. We’re sure this results in increased sales long term.
The content in this thank you email could also be broken up into a few different messages delivered on the day of purchase, and the day after.
DSTLD Thank You Note Email (Coupon Upsell)
This is a nice and simple thank you email template from DSTLD which could be delivered on the day of purchase, shortly after the order receipt. It’s a simple thank you note with a coupon code to encourage future purchases immediately.
This can be great for customer satisfaction, but don’t deliver this after every order – especially to loyal customers or repeat buyers. If you mention the coupon in the subject lines for these thank you message emails, open rates will be very high on the day of purchase.
For any brands with loyalty programs, this email would also be a good place to promote those.
Thinx Post Purchase Email for Customer Feedback (Survey Template)
Here Thinx is taking an interesting approach and using customer surveys to get valuable brand and product feedback. This is incentivized with the change to win a small gift or prize, but could also be done with discount codes.
This message in the thank you email series should be delivered a few days after a customer is expected to have received their most recent purchase.
Thank You Email Strategy Overview
Overall you want to include all of the information a new or existing customer needs in this series, and nothing they don’t. This is where you really make people know that customer appreciation is a big priority for your business. Understand what customers expect from a trustworthy brand – then go above and beyond.
The initial thank you email template contains the basics, then you can expand after that and introduce more of your brand in the later thank you messages. For most bands two to three emails will be sufficient here. This is especially try if there are a few days the customer needs to wait between ordering and receiving their items. Warm and fuzzy welcome emails can help fill that gap, and reinforce the buying decision.
After this point it’s normal to transition to a regular post purchase cross sell strategy where you’re messaging people based on what they bought, and recommending relevant products as their next purchase.
This gives a more personalized customer experience and will give your email templates an overall higher click through rate and conversion rate for the duration of the sequence. We’ll covered that in detail in another article.
Want to work with a specialist Klaviyo agency to build a strategy specifically for your brand? Just fill in our application call and speak with our team.