Shipping is the most emotional stage of the customer journey. Yet, you may be surprised to hear that 70% of retailers choose not to communicate with customers during the last mile process. Most brands give control to third party carriers after checkout. Some outsource tracking pages, but often these are unbranded templates that drive traffic back to the source, rather than to the retailer.
The good news is that this makes the post-purchase experience a great opportunity to stand out. parcelLab enables brands like yours to control every aspect of the customer journey. We’re not an off-the-shelf plug-in. Crucially, our last mile solution is completely white label. So, you can design, send and control every customer interaction in your own ecosystem. But don’t worry, getting started with parcelLab is still quick and easy. And, our team will be able to support you every step of the way.
Last mile delivery communication
To get started, you should identify the events you’d like to communicate to your customers. Our team can support you with this. Essentially, we will work together to map out a communication workflow, highlighting when, how and why your customer will be contacted.
In doing this, you can also plan how to embody your brand in these messages. It’s a great opportunity to inject some personality into what would otherwise be dull, logistics-heavy emails. This will help your customers differentiate your brand experience to any other company they buy from. When they recall buying the product, the brand-guided experience will be easy to remember.
Last mile engagement
It is important to remember that post-purchase emails receive high engagement. In fact, open rates can be 8 x higher than standard marketing emails. So, it’s really an untapped marketing source. Using the highly engaged customer touch points to win warm customers back to the site is an opportunity I’m sure your team will welcome.
Tracking emails have some of the highest engagement rates, upwards of 60% in fact. When this page is hosted in a brand’s ecosystem, it not only drives traffic back to the online store and provides a fully branded experience, but it also enables cross and upselling. And, the best part is that you already have a good deal of data for each customer. You can use their search history, purchases and viewed items to generate the best products to feature in your emails.
Last mile reporting
Another great benefit of choosing our platform is our reporting tool. It gives you invaluable insights into your processes post-checkout. Carriers have thousands of statuses, which are often hard to access and understand. Our platform translates these into intelligible, user friendly status codes that you can access via our reporting tool. They include ‘Order processed,’ ‘Pick-up planned,’ ‘In transit’ etc.
This is very helpful for your customer service team, who will be able to search and view Status Code for each respective order. If a customer calls in with a specific question about an order, the team will quickly be able to find clear answers. The statuses don’t end when the order is delivered. We have statuses for delivery locations including ‘Doorstep,’ ‘Neighbor,’ ‘Parcel Shop’ and ‘Parcel Locker’ for example. This will also help customer service teams deal with ‘Where is my order’ calls.
Last mile trends
We also track and report delivery issues, such as lost and damaged packages. This enables you to identify trends in problems, such as consistent damages, frequent delays, issues with addresses etc. Understanding these challenges is the best way to begin fixing them. We also provide reporting for time stamps and lead times. This is great data that will help you identify challenges. It can also give you great insights into carrier performance. Furthermore, it will help your team set realistic, achievable targets for improvement.
Watchlist alerts
In the same way, our platform has a feature called Watchlists, which essentially alerts users to active deliveries of interest. For example, if a customer was unable to receive a parcel, or there was a delay at the warehouse, or there was a data error, this will be proactively alerted within the reporting tool.
The great news is that when these challenges arise, your brand can proactively manage them. A ‘Delayed dispatch’ alert, for example, can trigger an automated apology email to the end customer, to manage their expectations. The result is that your customers feel completely confident that you will keep them updated with the status of their order, even if it isn’t going to plan.
Our last mile solution works for you
I’d recommend scheduling a demo with us. This will enable us to show you how everything works firsthand. Plus, we can focus specifically on your priorities. It’s always a great idea to take a look at some great examples of post-checkout emails from our customers. This should help you see the versatility of our platform, and hopefully give you some inspiration for your own!
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