Sometimes all your customers need is a little guidance.

📰 Guidance to find the right content (thanks content marketing!)

🛍 Guidance to find the right products (bonus points if it's in the form of a fun quiz!)

🙋‍♀️ Guidance to find the answers to their questions (both before there's a problem and after).

So it's on us as marketers, customer advocates, and operators to helpfully guide people along their buying journey.

Imagine you're the helpful concierge at a luxury hotel (or upscale downtown condominium) and it's your job to personally help every guest.

(Or, well, don't imagine it...because that basically is your job when you have an ecommerce biz if you want to keep your customers happy!)

How could you make sure your customers feel cared for every step of the way?

Let's take a look at what happens when brands take on a concierge approach both before and after the sale.

Link Diving

"We all want to be cared for"

That's the feel-good premise of Mark Hall's article on Smart Insights about offering concierge-style service on your ecommerce website.

Not sure of your customers' love language?

Caring for your customers can look like helping them pick the right products, improving your UX, and offering proactive customer support.

And it can also look like more sales from happier customers.

Hop over to Smart Insights to get Mark's advice on setting up Product Finders, offering Live Chat at the right moments, and making sure your copy and UX proactively address common customer questions.

📰 Read it here: Use ‘concierge selling’ to raise your e-commerce revenues

. . .

Concierge care in the post-purchase sequence

Being a friendly concierge before the sale is helpful. But it's a bad look when a brand suddenly stops offering concierge-level care the second the order is confirmed.

Aura Bora's Director of Ecommerce, Cameron Faist, has found a few simple ways to bring concierge treatment to the Post Purchase Sequence.

Cameron noticed that customers were opening their "Shipping Confirmation" emails 2-3 times before their order was delivered.

Side note: I probably open those emails at least a dozen times 😭

So he thought why not make the most of those emails?

Typically, when I hear marketers talk about "making the most of" the sky-high open rates on transactional emails, they're talking about stuffing in upsells and cross-sells.

Cameron is actually talking about making the most of those emails for the customers, not the brand's bottom line.

But that doesn't mean ignoring the value of your brand.

Cameron's first step is injecting a little bit more brand personality into each email (which is bound to increase LTV in the long run).

Cameron has successfully experimented with:

• Revamping the creative to make it more fun with the use of memes
• Adding more Post-Purchase emails to help customers answer the question, "Hey, where is my order?"
• Implementing new, more relevant Post-Purchase triggers by integrating Wonderment with Klaviyo

Overall, the focus is on being a more memorable brand and genuinely serving the customer with concierge-style post-purchase support.

🎙 Listen now: Put it On Repeat >> Aura Bora's Cameron Faist​

Delight Discovery

I am beyond obsessed with MYSA's conversational emails like this one...

This email fully embodies the concierge experience for me (and it's easy for me to spot because I'm the ideal buyer for this product). Here's a quick breakdown of what's working:

🥰 This email opens with a proven approach: join the conversation going on in your customer's head (in this case, they probably just saw the PUNCH feature on natural vermouths. If they haven't, Holly has linked to the article)

🥰 She then recreates the in-person shopping experience. If this were unfolding in my local wine shop (and not in an email), Holly would logically show me which bottles of natural vermouth she carries

🥰 There's even a link to helpful content. In this case, it's an easy, seasonal cocktail recipe (in case I'm wondering, "Yeah, vermouth is cool, but what do I do with it besides make two dozen Manhattans?!")

Buried Treasure

When we listen to customers, we find buried treasure (and sometimes swipe-worthy customer language!). Here’s this week’s featured product review:

This Buried Treasure was hiding on Rooted's Facebook page.

Rooted has a pretty literal concierge support offering: you can text them at their Plant Hotline before (or after) purchase to ask your worried plant parent questions.

This customer wasn't sure how much winter packaging they needed for their plant order. So they texted the hotline, got the answer they needed, placed the order, and had healthy plants arrive at their door 10 days later.

Without this concierge service, the customer may have

➡ Never placed the order (confused buyers often bounce)
➡ Paid for more winter packaging than they needed (and then resented the brand for it)
➡ Skipped the packaging due to confusion and had dead plants arrive at their door (refund time!!)

CX Twitter

I'm working to find the best of CX Twitter. Here are a few Tweets that caught my eye this week.

Val Geisler @lovevalgeisler Just took a quiz that then presented me with a checklist of recommended products (some pre-checked based on quiz results and others left as optional/suggestions). The next step was a checkout button, my cart was populated, and Shop Pay was waiting for me. This is the way. April 27th 2022 4 Retweets 93 Likes

A quiz is a great way to offer concierge assistance before the sale. And sounds like this brand really focused on making the entire purchase experience as frictionless as possible. Which, now that I mention it, is kind of the whole role of a concierge!

Kristen LaFrance @kdlafrance What's interesting/exciting about the cannabis commerce space to you? 🍃 I love the concierge retail aspect of dispensaries + the potential for more experiential retail that could come with legalization (cannabis bars/restaurants) and delivery! Drop your thoughts 👇 April 14th 2021 2 Retweets 26 Likes

Agree with the potential here. It has me curious about which other industries are ideal fits for highly personalized recommendations based on zero-party data & buying behavior.

Liciê Leite @licieleite @itsJoanneCoffey Hey Joanne👋 @miracleminkhair has a conversational pop-up that did wonders for them (61% completion rate and 11.5% CVR). Here's a case study on it: octaneai.com/customers/mira… @Aislingorganics convo pop-up is also top notch with CVR around 14%, but I think you knew that already 😉 Joanne Coffey @itsJoanneCoffey Does anyone have an example of a killer conversational popup or know of any brands that have one live on its site? May 5th 2022 0 Retweets 2 Likes

Click through to see the case study about Miracle Mink Hair's conversational popup. TLDR: 27% lift in revenue by guiding customers to the right products with interactive website experiences.

Let me know what kind of CX, marketing, and customer-focused curiosities you've been exploring lately. I'd love to hear what you've discovered.

- Megan