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Setting up a purchase follow-up email is one of the most effective things you can do for your business. The post-purchase period is a crucial point in your customer's journey, and a purchase follow-up email provides you the opportunity to build brand loyalty and create repeat customers. To send a fully realized purchase follow-up email:

You need to be integrated with BigCommerce, Shopify, Shopify Plus, or Wix so that your customers' order information is available in your Privy content.
Please disable any follow-up emails already in use by your e-commerce platform or other email service providers so that your customers aren’t emailed twice.

Example use-cases

Creating loyal customers might not provide the same rush that closing a new deal does, but it's arguably more important to your business's long-term success. Each increase in customer retention has an outsized impact on your profits compared to simply generating news business. With this in mind, here are a few emails you can use to turn more of your orders into loyal repeat customers:

The Order Confirmation - This email includes the order summary content block, and its immediate relevance to the recipient encourages high levels of engagement. Learn how to make these as effective as possible in this Privy blog post.

The Thank You - An engaging thank-you message can help you stand out and establish a lasting connection with your customer. This email is also a good time to surprise and delight your customers with a special offer (e.g., a unique coupon code).

The Survey - It's no secret that customers like to be heard and, if you're not, you should probably be listening. A common approach for collecting this feedback is called Net Promoter Score (NPS). It's a single-question survey that asks customers to rank how likely they are to recommend your product on a scale of 1 to 10. Allowing your customers to access this type of survey after spending some time with your product helps to establish and maintain a dialog between you and them.

The Helping Hand - There will always be customers who need or want a little extra help to make the most of your product. Consider following up with a how-to guide or some insider tips and tricks. This information is best sent a few days or weeks after the initial purchase and is an excellent opportunity to leverage your other existing content (e.g., blog posts and videos). If you are a Shopify user, the "Received the Order" action in the email's settings is perfect for this situation.

Create and send your emails

Purchase follow-up emails can be sent to any mailable contact who has completed a purchase through your checkout flow. You are also able to insert an order summary content block, which is unique to follow-up emails and allows recipients to see the contents of their purchase as an itemized list. To create and send a purchase follow-up email:

Navigate to Automations > New automation.
Click the Purchase Follow-up option. This action opens Privy's 3-Step email editor.

1) Design the email

Edit the content of your email using the drag and drop email editor. A basic example is provided automatically; however, this starting point can be changed by selecting Templates > Choose a Template from the editor’s toolbar. Once a template is selected, click the Save button to have it applied to the email. If you are a Shopify or Shopify Plus user, please check out these special considerations before customizing your email’s content.

Note: The “Keep Shopping” button included in some templates defaults to the URL provided in the Business Information section of your Business Settings, but its value can be changed to another location (e.g., A customer’s cart) by clicking on it and updating the setting in the sidebar.

Make sure to select the Save button at the top-right after making your changes.

Consider offering an incentive

Purchase follow-up emails are a great place to offer a coupon because the visitor has already expressed enough interest to purchase a product or service from you. Industry norms indicate that customers are often most engaged in the 30 days after their first purchase and that repeat customers are more profitable to your business. Once first-time customers make that crucial second purchase, they’re much more likely to keep buying from you. An incentive can help expedite this process.

To add a discount to your purchase follow-up email, either:
- Click into a content block that contains text and input or insert the Coupon Code merge tag, which appears like this: {{ coupon_code }}. This tag will populate with the coupon code when the email is sent to customers. Make sure to include appropriate positioning text near the code so that it is easy for the recipient to understand what they are receiving.

- Drag-and-drop the Coupon element from the sidebar into your email and select the desired coupon from the prompt. Also, make sure to include appropriate positioning text near the code so that it is easy for the recipient to understand what they are receiving.

Make sure to select the Save button at the top-right after making any changes.

Learn more about personalizing your messaging with merge tags in this guide, and about inserting coupons into your content in this guide.

Configure the sender information

Next, click into the sender info section at the top of the email editor and configure the options.

Confirm or select a reply-to address. Any replies to the email will go to this address.
Edit the subject line. Keep it interesting, on-brand, and concise. A subject line no longer than 7 words or around 40 characters is recommended.
Provide preview text. The text appears after your subject line when viewing the email in the inbox and allows the addition of compelling copy that helps boost open rates and engagement. The text should be 35 to 55 characters and does support Merge Tags.

Please make sure to select the Save button at the top-right after making your changes.

Note: To update the default From Name and Address used for your emails, navigate to the Sender Options section of your account settings. Additionally, consider updating your sending domain so you can use custom addresses associated with your domain and improve your deliverability.

2) Preview and test the email

With an email customized, return to the top of the email editor and click the Next button to preview the email in desktop and mobile views. If you are unable to click the button, make sure you've saved your most recent changes. To preview the email in your actual inbox, select the Send Test Email button. The test is sent to the email address associated with your Privy login credentials.

3) Configure the email settings

With your design previewed and tested, return to the top of the email editor and click the Next button to configure the email's trigger and coupon settings. Click the Edit button next to the settings you'd like to change. The following trigger settings are available:

Set the timing of the email. Choose the length of time since someone's order was placed or delivered (Shopify Only - A default shipping carrier with tracking information is required) before the follow-up email is sent. The default is 4 hours, but you can extend this up to 90 days.
Segment by order count. Configure the email so that it only sends if the customer has placed a certain number of orders. With order count segmentation, you can create a different set of emails after customers reach certain purchase thresholds.
Set the minimum order value. Enter the minimum order value that a shopper must have to receive a follow-up email. The default is $0, which means anyone who has made a purchase should receive the email.
Set maximum order value. Use the optional maximum order value if you plan on making tiered offers to customers with different order values. For example, you could offer no discount to shoppers that completed a purchase at $49 or less but offer a 10% discount to shoppers who purchased $50 or more.
Segment by product. If the account is integrated with a Shopify or Shopify Plus store, the email can be configured so that it only sends if the customer's order contained specific items. Learn more about product IDs and product segmentation here.

After editing the trigger settings, please select the section’s Save button.

Confirm the coupon settings

Next, if you included a coupon code in your email, make sure you've selected a code from the dropdown in the Coupon section of your email settings. If you'd like to include a coupon, but none are available in the dropdown, learn how to create coupon codes in this guide.

Name the email

Name the email by clicking the Edit Title() icon, providing a non-default name, and clicking the Update button. This name change will make it easier to locate the email for additional edits or a performance review post-send.

Activate the email

To activate an email once its design, content, and settings are customer-ready:

Click the Save button in the email builder if you haven't already.
Scroll to the top of the Settings step and click the Activate button.

The purchase follow-up email will start sending to qualifying visitors automatically.

Note: Only orders completed after the activation will trigger the email. Once triggered, the email is scheduled to send X hours/days from the selected trigger. The tool will not work retroactively.

Create a series

Repeat these steps to create additional emails for a follow-up series. Review the Example use-cases section of this article for a refresher on what these emails might focus on, and be sure to leave enough time between the emails so that customers feel engaged but not inundated.

Note: If the email is part of a series, please make sure there’s enough time to create, edit, and enable the other emails without issue. You can always return to the emails and activate them when all elements of the series are ready for customers.

Review the email's performance

Now that your follow-up emails are sending to customers:

Learn how to evaluate their success via reporting in this guide.
Discover which customers will ultimately receive your emails and why in this guide.