Using Email to Battle Buyer’s Remorse

Earlier this year I bought a new car. There were a few mental obstacles that I had to hurdle in order for me to actually make my final purchase. One of the first was, in switching from an SUV to a car, giving up my SUV’s benefit of road visibility. I was able to get over that concern through realizing benefits a car had over an SUV, but still had my reservations.

Another issue to me was that I purchased a car that was, in essence, in its first model year. I typically like to get a new car that has had one or two model years behind it to work out the kinks, but this one caught my fancy so much so that I decided to make the leap against my better judgment.

In the months following my purchase, the car being new and relatively desirable, I get the questions from friends and other unacquainted parties: “how do you like it?” I answer the questions with vague responses, such as, “I like it” and “it’s pretty peppy.”

I am happy that I am at least able to project a generally positive experience because I have had – knock on wood – no problems with the vehicle thus far and it has certainly grown on me. I am, however, by no means a commercial for the car; I simply don’t have all that much to say.

I am proposing a solution to this customer’s indifference: Give your customers something to say by communicating with them post-purchase via e-newsletters and help them overcome their potential buyer’s remorse. Once you’ve assuaged their concerns, assuming your product is at least meeting the customer’s needs or desires, you can aid their future dialogue with colorful details about your product. Then, you can finally turn them into raving evangelists for your product.

Here’s how I suggest you approach this strategy:

Capture their names
If you can, be sure to encourage your customers to accept useful communications from you. People are savvy about email lists these days and they know that what you really mean is that you want to sell them other stuff. Be sure to give them an idea of what you’re going to send them. Prove to them that you are going to send them information related to their purchased product with helpful tips to allow them to maximize their value from their purchase.

Know what they bought
One of the currently popular themes in Web marketing is the concept of personalization – the concept that you can deliver specifically targeted and relevant promotions to individual consumers based on the information you have about them and their habits. The only way that one can personalize information to a user is by adding to your arsenal of knowledge about them. If you’ve sold them the product, you know what product they own and probably a few other characteristics, so be sure to set up your CRM system to capture this simple data to continually provide more relevant information to your customer.

Know your product’s lifecycle
One key to making this program work and easy to execute is to map out your communications strategy based on the customer or product lifecycle and deliver email on that path. In other words, if you know that your customer will likely be in the market for a replacement product in two years, then you will want to map out a two year individualized communication strategy where you deal with immediate buyer’s remorse issues, then transition to customer maintenance (such as ensuring that they are receiving sufficient customer service) and then on to re-sell once they get close to that replacement date. Clearly there are specific details within that overview, but those details will likely be different depending on your product and your customer types.

Understand their concerns
Ideally, you need to understand your customers’ concerns, or at least the typical concerns related to your product or product category so that you can use that information to craft your pitch. For example, if you know that customers are typically concerned about the safety of your particular product, you can highlight the interesting, advanced process by which you tested the safety of their particular product.

There are simple ways to find your customers’ concerns. One “Internet era” way of discovering customers’ inner-thoughts is to monitor the blogosphere for your product, brand or category. People blog all the time about their concerns related to a variety of product categories (for reference, here’s an article I wrote on this particular subject: https://chiefmarketer.com/crm_loop/custom/topstory/measure-blogosphere/). Use this information to your advantage in crafting your emails’ content and positioning.

Toot your horn
Once you understand the various general concerns customers may have had about the product they’ve recently purchased, in your emails be sure to tout any product accolades or high ratings you’ve received that either combat those concerns or steer the customer away from them. Consumers want to learn that experts agree with their purchase.

Another option is to highlight features that are maybe not on the immediate surface of your product. They may not currently realize some of those unique features even exist. This tactic helps fill in the details that your customers may then use when describing their purchase to friends. Instead of saying, “the car is peppy,” they can say, “the car was rated the fastest in its class with more power than the competitor’s car you’re also considering.” When details like this are revealed by a proud owner who has overcome their own buyer’s remorse, they become very persuasive.

They’re not alone
When you’re talking about a car, it is likely to be clear for people to realize that they’re not alone in their purchase decision. They see the same makes and models navigating the freeways around them. However, there are a few car companies that really make an effort to make customers feel part of the family. Land Rover, for example, takes people on excursions to learn how to maximize their vehicle’s potential with other owners.

This tactic can be applied even more simply through continually delivering testimonials, news about upcoming events and offer stories about how other customers are using your products in unique ways. These kinds of stories can make for an interesting read and provide action-items for customers who would also like to make the best use of their purchase and perhaps contribute their own story.

Give them a soapbox
The final consideration, once you’ve cultivated an effective e-newsletter campaign, be sure ask them to talk about the product they bought with their friends, family and colleagues. If they’ve appreciated the consistent content you’ve been sending, they’ve probably already been saying a few nice things here and there, but it certainly can’t hurt for more. Offer the customer ways to send the newsletter to a friend, link to an online version of some of the stories or perhaps offer them additional content to share with others. This tactic will allow them to follow up with a friend to say, “Here are some more details on the feature I was telling you about.”

The only way for something like this to become viral is to provide useful, compelling and unique content and give people an easy way to pass it along.

Conclusion
You put a lot of effort into winning awards, developing positive press and engineering your product. Be sure that you not only use that information in the pre-sales process, but also in the post-sale process in order to arm your budding evangelists with accurate, exciting knowledge to share with other prospective customers. By appropriately using available email distribution tools or CRM packages with the process broadly outlined above, you can craft a campaign to turn your customers into persuasive, story-telling evangelists for your product or brand.

Your customers should be your best sales asset, be sure to continually connect with them and help them to turn their own cognitive dissonance into synchronization with your own sales strategy. They want to feel confident in their decision and also project that confidence; this is a great way to provide them the tools.

Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive (http://www.reddoor.biz), a firm that creates comprehensive Internet presences for clients. Services offered include technology integration, online marketing, web traffic analysis, search engine promotion, web site content updates and comprehensive web site design.