What ecommerce order tracking automation can (and can’t) do
Customers are moderately obsessed with tracking their ecommerce order status: 60% of shoppers track their package at least once a day after placing an order, while 17% track their orders multiple times a day!
Accordingly, 97% of shoppers think that ecommerce order tracking is an important part of the customer journey—so if your brand can’t provide them with real-time visibility around their order status, they may seek out alternatives.
The good news is, providing your shoppers with transparency in tracking doesn’t put a heavy burden on your CX team. With the right order tracking automation solution in place, it’s easy to give your customers the visibility they crave.
Let’s take a look at how your brand can make the most of automated order tracking and ecommerce fulfillment updates.
Build automated email and SMS transactional campaigns to keep customers informed
Every time a shopper places an order on your site or app, they should immediately begin receiving updates on their order status through email and (if they’ve opted in) SMS and/or in-app notifications. Start with an order confirmation message that confirms their order and serves as a receipt, including your estimated time frame for shipping. From there, you can send them a shipping confirmation notice that includes a tracking number, with several follow-ups as the delivery makes its way to your customer’s door, followed by a “your delivery has arrived!” message.
All of these messages can be automated, using templated campaigns that are auto-populated with the customer’s unique information—keeping your shopper informed at every stage of the delivery process.
Give your shoppers access to a branded order tracking page
Once you have a tracking number for your shopper’s package, Loop enables you to have a unique branded order tracking page that matches your brand’s aesthetics, creating a seamless customer experience. Your tracking page can include curated product recommendations to generate upsell revenue, lifting conversion rates by 10%. You can also include a FAQ that answers common shipping-related questions. You’ll be able to link shoppers to this page throughout your transactional messaging campaigns, ensuring that they can tap into real-time shipping updates at every stage of the delivery process and lowering “where’s my order?” support inquiries by 40%.
Send proactive alerts around delivery exceptions
Most packages arrive on schedule—but what about the ones that won’t?
Rather than letting your shopper down, get ahead of the bad news by setting up alerts as soon as your brand gets notification of a delivery delay from the shipping carrier. You can set up triggered campaigns that activate new workflows in these special cases, such as “ship a replacement order if a package is delayed by more than 5 hours.”
You’ll also automatically shift from your standard “all is well” delivery notification template to a “bad news—but we’re handling it” template, in which you can let the shopper know about the carrier issue, but assure them that you’ve already sent a replacement order their way.
Using automation to keep the shopper informed about updates to their anticipated delivery will ensure that they stay confident in your brand, even in the face of shipping delays.
Activate post-delivery workflows to increase customer engagement and retention
Once your order arrives, the order tracking journey is complete—but sharing additional content and offers through automated campaigns will help customers stay committed to your brand. Your post-purchase messaging templates might include:
- Review requests: Get shoppers’ honest feedback on the purchase by asking them to rate or review it on your website. This feedback will help your team with refining its inventory, and give future customers better data for making purchasing decisions.
- Customer education: If the purchase requires a learning curve, it’s important to send out automated messages showcasing how to use it successfully, with videos and tips to optimize their chance of success.
- Re-order or upsell prompts: If your product (i.e., lipstick or dog treats) requires frequent replenishment, set up timed reminders encouraging them to order their next shipment. If they’re not likely to repurchase the same exact product, you can build templates that include curated product recommendations that pair well with their last purchase, encouraging upsells and repeat purchases.
Order tracking and customer service: Pairing automation with a personal touch
In most cases, you can fully automate your order tracking and post-purchase follow up—but a small percent of situations may require a higher level of support, so it’s important that you have a strong CX team on hand to engage with your customers in those cases.
Maybe the package never arrived, even though it was listed as delivered—or it did arrive, but the expensive vase the shopper bought showed up broken.
While you can resolve these types of issues with customized workflows through Loop’s returns portal, many customers will feel better having the chance to talk through the problem and understand how your team’s going to solve it. By demonstrating empathy and showing customers that you understand their concern, you’ll be able to ease their frustrations and help them regain confidence after things go wrong.
Employing automation throughout your customer journey enables you to provide best-in-class customer support at scale, ensuring that your shoppers can easily talk to a real person when they need to, and solve problems quickly with self-service resources when they don’t.
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