REPEAT COMMERCE: 04 - How To Improve Your "Second Order" Rate.

0:05Here's what most Shopify stores I talk to call a reorder strategy. They set one reminder, which on average is 30 days after purchase, and they send it to every single customer the same way and forever. Now, think about who's getting that email. The person who bought one bag of coffee and the person who bought six bags of coffee, both getting it after 30 days. Now, one of those customers is out and the other still has five months of coffee left in their cupboard. Also, the customer on their first order and the customer on their fifth order who has a track record you could set your watch to, but they're all treated identically.

0:47One timer, every human, no memory of what they actually bought or when they bought it last. And we can do so much better than that. And today I want to show you how. So welcome back to Shopify 1%. I'm Jay Myers, and this is episode four of the repeat commerce series. Now, if you missed the first three episodes, definitely go back and listen to them because they are building on each other. And there is actually a PDF in the show notes. And each episode, I am adding another section on that PDF. And it's basically a scorecard. And each episode, you're going to add one number to it that builds on it.

1:30And at the end, you're going to have this beautiful audit, repeat audit of your store. So there's been three episodes. You can go back. All the details are on the PDF, but it is, I highly recommend listening to the episodes too, because we actually walk through how to actually get the numbers. So make sure you grab the one from this. And if you didn't listen to last week, go back and listen to them. Now, if you did, and if you did that work, you should be holding a scorecard with some honest numbers on it. And I know many of you are thinking, Jay, enough measuring. Just tell me what to actually do.

2:05So in this episode, we're going to do that. We're going to stop measuring and we're going to actually start fixing. And so we're going to start with what I believe is the single highest leverage point in your entire customer relationship. What do you think that is? Think in your head for a moment. I'll tell you what it is. It's the second order. The second order is the most important point in your entire customer relationship. Now, I said it on the end of the last episode, and I'll say it again. I believe this so deeply. There is no more important order than the second one. The first order you basically paid for, you probably got them with some ads.

2:49You probably lost money on it, and we covered that in episode one. The second order is where the actual business starts. So by the end of this episode, you'll have one automation live in your store, timed to a customer's real behavior instead of just a blind 30-day timer. One concrete thing that we're going to build today. OmniSend just shipped something that I've always wanted. You can now connect OmniSend to ChatGPT or Claude and just say, where can my email and SMS campaigns be making more money? And it actually figures it out. It reads your store data, all your campaign details, your store history, and it tells you, and the insights are legit good.

3:30And even better, you can then say, okay, let's fix that or build that campaign. And it actually does it right from your chat. It's wild. Now, if you're one of our listeners, you can get 30 % off for three months on OmniSend. Just go to the show notes. There's a link there. Or you can just use the code J30, J-A-Y-3-0 when you sign up. Now, if you're using another email and SMS platform and you want to switch to OmniSend, which is a great idea, they will do the migration for you. Just give them five days and then you show up with everything set, ready to go. Now they've migrated thousands of stores from Klaviyo and on average, they're saving 35 % on their email and SMS bills.

4:06If you're listening to this show, you clearly care about your Shopify business. If your store isn't backed up and protected, it could all be for nothing. That's why I tell every store owner I know who cares about their business, you 100 % need Rewind installed. It's a non-negotiable for me. One bad CSV import, one app that edits your store the wrong way, which has happened to basically everyone I know. One bulk edit gone wrong, and now AI making changes for you. Listen, Shopify does not have an undo button. Rewind is the undo button. Go to shopify1percent.com slash rewind for 30 days free on us.

4:47Links in the show notes too. Last year, I went to Commerce Roundtable in San Diego and it was so good. I'm going back again this year. It's September 21st and 22nd. And honestly, you should come too. It's the one e-commerce event that I recommend to everybody without blinking. It's not a trade show. There's no booth demos. It's really just operators on stage sharing what's actually working in their stores right now. and it's basically a room full of all founders. I was actually scrolling through my camera roll from last year and I have over a hundred pictures of slides from people's talks. It's, I learned so much.

5:19It's that kind of an event. Now I have five passes to give away for a 30 % off ticket. It's first come first serve. So if you're interested, email me jay at shopify1percent.com and I will hook you up. They will go fast. So email if you're interested. And if you're going, come say hi. Let's grab a coffee or a drink during happy hour. I'd love to meet you.

5:42I want to be clear about why I keep hammering this second order thing specifically, because think about the jump from the first purchase to the second. A first time buyer, they don't know you. They don't trust you. They might not even remember who you are. They just, they took a chance on you. They saw an ad, they were scrolling Instagram. A friend told them, they mentioned you. Maybe there was a sale or a price. Like they're not loyal. They're just curious. The second order is the moment that curiosity turns into a relationship or doesn't. And once someone orders from you twice, the odds of them ordering a third and a fourth time increase dramatically.

6:24The second purchase is the hinge that the whole thing swings on. And remember the numbers from the last episode on our whiteboard store example. We had 6 ,000 out of 8 ,000 customers had a full year to come back and reorder and they just didn't. The store had a 25 % reorder rate. So, I mean, that's not a subscription problem. That's not an ads problem. That's what I would call a second order problem. And almost nobody is actively working on it. Everybody optimizes for the first purchase. They optimize their ads, the landing page, the checkout. The second purchase, it doesn't get any love. It gets a static 30-day email and that's it.

7:04So that's the gap. And we're going to address it. So let's talk about why the way that most stores attack this is actually broken. So the core mistake, and I just want to go out and actually name it, is most reorder reminders run on a static timer. 30 days after a purchase, send an email to remind them to reorder. Same delay, same time window, same message to everyone. and a static timer ignores three things that actually decide when someone reorders. So number one is, well, how much did they buy on their last order? If a bag lasts 30 days, then someone who bought one bag needs a nudge around day 25, but someone who bought six bags doesn't need a nudge until maybe month five or six.

7:51Well, unless I'll get into it, but they might need a nudge after one if they have a really big family, but that is going to be to my next one, which is order history. so this is number two a customer on their fifth reorder has a rhythm so you know there's a chance that a customer who orders five bags does need it every month if they're buying it for a restaurant or a really big family but that would be because you looked at their order history and you looked at their rhythm and you can see it they come back every 42 days and they order six bags but a static timer throws all that away and just treats them like a stranger and the third thing is the gap between their past orders.

8:29So someone whose orders are kind of slowly stretching out like 60 days, 90 days, and then 100 days, they're drifting away. And a generic 30-day email, it's not going to catch them. You need a different approach. So the fix isn't better email, it's better timing. So stop asking how many days after purchase should I send this and start asking, when is the specific customer actually going to run out based on what they bought and what they've done before? And that's the whole shift from a timer to a behavior. So we're going to do the whiteboard analogy again to put some numbers on it. We're going to go back to a coffee brand so it's familiar.

9:08So say a bag of coffee lasts 30 days for a typical drinker. Now, this month, a thousand customers bought from you, but they didn't all buy the same amount. Let's say 600 of them bought one bag, which would be roughly a 30-day supply. 300 bought two bags, roughly 60 days, roughly. Again, this is like very, very rough. For some people, one bag might last three months, but very rough. And 100 of those customers, let's say they bought six bags. So let's call that half a year supply. Now, here's the static timer approach that most stores do. On day 30, every single one of those thousand customers would get the same time to reorder email, all thousand of them.

9:54So for the 601 bag buyers, okay, not horrible, but not great, but it's okay. Decent timing because they are likely about to run out. Although some people don't drink much coffee and it could definitely be off, but then there's gets even worse. The 300 people who bought two bags while they're likely only halfway through, uh, it's way too early. So they'll just ignore it. And then the hundred people who bought six bags, well, you just told someone with five months of coffee to buy more coffee. And that email is actually worse than useless. It makes you look like you're just not paying attention.

10:37So realistically, and don't grade my exact numbers here, but this is illustrative, but out of that thousand, maybe 600, the one bag folks convert at a roughly normal rate. But almost nobody else does because the timing's wrong for 400 of them. And then now, if we look at the behavior-based approach, the one-bag buyer should get their nudge at day 25. The two-bag buyer should get a nudge at around day 55. The six-bag buyer, roughly at five months. Every customer gets the nudge when it's true for them. Same email, same store, same thousand customers. One conversion just fires blind, annoys 400 people.

11:20And the other shows up pretty close to when the person might actually be running out. The second version doesn't just convert better. It roughly triples the reorders of that cohort because you stopped wasting the nudge on people who didn't need it. And honestly, the annoying people part might matter more than the conversion part. Because every time you send someone an email at the wrong moment, you're actually training them to tune you out. So the static timer isn't just leaving money on the table. It's actually burning your list. At the beginning of the show, I told you why everyone serious about their Shopify business should have their store backed up and protected with Rewind.

12:04There is no excuse not to. There literally is no undo button for Shopify. Shopify's own terms actually say that your data is 100 % your responsibility, Your products, your theme, your customizations, your settings, everything. They don't back up any of it. And no, a CSV export does not cover it. With CSV exports, there's no images, no meta fields, no themes, settings, etc. Nothing. I was talking to the people at Rewind about a brand where one team member actually ran a bulk update and accidentally overwrote 11 ,000 products. Orders, customers, contacts, all of it gone in a single action. Luckily though, with Rewind, it was a simple one-click rollback.

12:48It could be anything. A bad CSV import, a random app you just installed that messes everything up, or all of these AI tools that everyone's using to manage their store now. I have heard so many horror stories. Rewind just gives you peace of mind no matter what. If you don't have Rewind installed, you absolutely should have it. Go now and get it. Shopify 1 % dot com slash Rewind. you'll get an exclusive 30 days free on me. The link is also in the show notes. At the top of the show, I mentioned OmniSend can now talk to ChatGPT and Claude. And I want to tell you why that's even bigger than it sounds.

13:23So if you missed a quick catch up, OmniSend is what I use for email and SMS on every Shopify store I work with plus for this show as well. And you can now connect your AI, Claude ChatGPT straight to your OmniSend account, your data, your campaigns, your flows, everything. You open a chat and you ask, what should I focus on this week to make more money? And it will come back with real answers about your store, which flow is underperforming, which automation needs improvement, which customers are going quiet, what's missing, everything. My favorite part though is AI segments. I used to build these by hand, clicking through filters forever.

14:01Now I just type something like customers who bought twice, but ignored my last campaign and it just builds it. and anything it writes already sounds exactly like your brand because it pulls from all your previous emails, from your website, your logo, your color, your voice, everything. I've been doing this for 15 years and this is the closest I've ever felt to having a full-time marketer sitting right beside me. I have a link for you in the show notes that will give you 30 % off for your first three months or you can just use code J30 when you sign up, J-A-Y-3-0. If you're ready to migrate from Klaviyo to OmniSend like thousands of others, they will do everything for you.

14:36You just show up and all your campaigns and automations from Klaviyo will be set up and running in OmniSend, ready to go. And usually at 35 % less what you were paying Klaviyo.

14:50Okay, so how do you actually build this? And there's really four plays and I'm going to kind of list it in priority order here. The first two are the big ones and three and four are going to make them work better. So play number one is time it to their behavior, not a fixed day. Now, this is the whole ballgame. So that's why this is first is you need your reorder window, not a guess at what the actual number is. So the good news is if you did last episode's homework during the episode, and you should have a number for your cohort reorder window, that data shows how long your customers typically take to come back.

15:30if you don't have that number or if you didn't do it definitely go back and listen to the episode but if you if you want i'll just tell you the easiest way to do that is you can just ask sidekick what's the average time between my first and second order for my customers and you can narrow that down by product if you want to you can say what's the average time between my first and second order for this product now that gives you a very wide range it's decent but i'm going to get into why it's not perfect but it's it's pretty good it's a heck of a lot better than just a static 30 days for everyone it's a baseline I would say so but from there you're gonna then you can set a trigger that fires that many days after each customer's order and then adjusted to how many of each product they bought so now how you do it well there's really two ways there's the do-it-yourself way, which is with Shopify flow.

16:25So let's talk about that one first is for those who don't know. So Shopify flow used to only be available on plus it's now available on every Shopify plan. So basic all the way up. So if you're not on Shopify plus and you didn't know that you 100 % should go check out flow flow is basically Shopify's automation tool that allows you to set triggers and then have an action take out. So, and you actually don't even have to build it by hand anymore. You can just go to sidekick and, and say, build me this flow. Like if you went in flow, you would set a trigger order placed and then add a wait step and then add another flow, another event delay so many days, and then add the action to send the email.

17:07But you could just go to sidekick and say, wait 20 days after an order, then send a reorder reminder and it'll build that workflow for you. And that gets you a solid single window reorder reminder, which is a big step up from a dumb 30 day blast for everybody. Cause you can do this by different products and have a 20 day reminder for one product and a 35 day for a different product, but it can be a lot better. And now I'm going to do something that I don't always do on this show. I'm going to tell you about a product that we built because it's just naturally perfect for this. And I, as you know, I try to make these episodes not about bold or what we build, but this specific episode is a huge exception to this because the thing that we built and the thing that I'm teaching you about today are literally the exact same thing.

18:02So it would be honestly weird if I didn't mention it. So we've got a app that we launched in about six months ago, and it's called Repeat, R-E-P-E-T-E. You can learn more about it by going to repeat.me. But in a nutshell, what it is, it's an AI reorder agent that predicts when every individual customer on your store is due for a refill and then nudges each customer at a different time with a different message through a different channel, depending on how they interact for an easy one-click reorder. So now doing it with Shopify Flow is pretty good. You can get a different reorder time by product.

18:45What we do is it's actually customer by customer. So one customer might need their coffee every 47 days, even though they bought one bag. And another customer might need their coffee every 14 days. They also bought one bag. So just because it's one bag, it doesn't mean it's 25 days for everybody. So repeat figures that all out. And then actually it's an AI agent. So it messages the customer for you. You don't have to write the emails, the SMS. It does browser push on site, everything, dynamic ads, meta ads. Its whole job is to get you more reorders. So flow is very good for a better fixed window for a product.

19:28Repeat is the next level. If you really want the most personalized on-demand reorder and edges for your customers, definitely try Repeat. And I'm going to just put a link in the show notes here for anyone who wants to try it. Repeat is completely free. There's no charge to install it. There's no app fee. There's no SMS fees even. Like it can send 100 ,000 SMS for you and there isn't a single fee for that. I mean, 100 ,000 SMS would, I don't know. I think that would be about$7 ,000. that's not right probably$3 ,000 but either way there's no fees the way the app works is there's only a fee if it actually gets you a reorder but I'll put a link in the show notes so that the first$10 ,000 in reorders are free if you want to try it out definitely worth trying if you want to build it yourself and tune it over time flow is a great way to do it and it's free so do that but if you want to go and make it very predicted and personalized per customer without having to manage it, that's what we made repeat for.

20:31So either way, the principle is the same. And the principle here is what matters. Time it to the human, not the calendar. And we have seen the impact of when you time it to a human. We have some brands that have increased the reorder rate. We have one that has hit 24%. Most are around 12 to 15, which is still amazing. But we have brands increasing repeat revenue by 24%, which just shows that there are customers who want to order from you more. They just need to be nudged. They just need to be reminded. Like if you sell protein powder and you don't nudge them the next time they're in a grocery store, they'll just buy it there.

21:15So, So, you know, the principle is 100 % true that better timing will get you better results. One step further, better personalized messaging, better results. And then also channel. Is it push? Is it email? Is it SMS? Gets you better results as well, too. So that's play number one, getting the timing right. You can do it yourself through flow or give repeat a try. It's just kind of works like magic and it does it for you. Play number two is what I say, kill the reorder friction. So the first play, go back to what I wrote here. It's like timing, timing it to their behavior. And the second one is killing the friction.

21:53So even with a perfectly timed nudge, if you have too much friction in between when the customer says, yeah, I'll reorder. And then you have a bunch of clicks and then you send them to the product page and then they got to find the variant, select them out of the cart, go to cart, go to checkout. You're still going to lose a percentage of customers like the the data shows that every extra click and the longer it takes, unless they're like helpful clicks, but these are not helpful clicks. Like if you know what they ordered last time, just make it super simple. And to be honest, Shopify checkout is really your best friend here because you can permalink right directly to their checkout with the product in there, variant in there.

22:31And 80 % of people are logged into ShopPay. So at that point, it's just a click and the reorder is on the way. We do actually have with Repeat, we send them through a smart cart, which shows other replenishable products that they might also want to reorder, which does extremely well. And so it is an extra click and maybe it loses one or 2 % of people who would reorder. But on average, reorders are, I think it's 37 % higher. Like the number is, it's wild. Because these are customers who are reordering from you, they know you. So they're very likely to accept an offer. so the net gains of that extra click far outweigh the one or two percent that you might you might lose it but the the point here is as much as possible you want to close that gap and make it as close to one tap reorder as possible so yeah like i said if you can get them directly to check out uh in the cart with a permalink that's the way to do it okay so then kind of play three is I like to say, give a reason that just isn't a discount to reorder.

23:41Cause like the lazy thing that most stores do is they say, come back and reorder. Here's 15 % off. And a discount can work and it has its place. But if it's your only tool, really like all you're doing is training your best customers to wait for a coupon. And I've got coupons from people to reorder stuff. And now I won't reorder until I get my coupon. And I, I know so many brands like this. I keep getting coupons and I will never reorder unless I get that coupon. And so if I don't see the email, they might lose me as a customer because I can only wait so long, but basically you're just teaching them that buying at full price is for suckers.

24:21So before you reach out with a discount, try a reason. So the simplest reason is, is good timing. So, uh, with a good message, just saying like, you're probably running low. Is it time for more? And honestly, like that type of message converts. And we see this because we, with repeats and AI reorder agent, it tries thousands of different messaging and short, simple to the point, helpful, not salesy, not marketing, not any extra words, the shorter the better. It's a reorder reminder. It's not a marketing message. That's what works the best. And then, or if it's an add-on, if it's a genuinely good complimentary product, that is helpful too.

25:07So here's the grinder that fits with the coffee maker that you got or the filters that work with your coffee maker. So, which is also a reorder play. So, you know, save the discount for customers who are actually starting to drift. If a customer hasn't reordered for three or four times, that's when you want to use a discount. And I'll just say, Repeat handles this really well. You can set discounts that only after a while do they kick in. So it handles that nicely. But the most important thing is just don't, by default, give a discount right off the bat. I will say this, though. If you have a discount on your subscription, so if your subscription program is subscribe and save 5 % or 10%, I think the right thing to do is to match the subscription discount.

25:55I think treating your customers who like to reorder when they want it, not on a subscription, they're still valuable customers. They just choose not to subscribe, but they might reorder from you 20 times. so treat them the same as you treat a subscriber but don't give them any extra discount on top of that okay play number four is the one of the best ways to get the second order is to make the first order memorable enough to reorder so the first order is really the foundation and if it if it's broken and if the other three are just useless like that we talked about already like the you're shooting those messages into the void if the first order experience was really bad.

26:40So a few episodes back, I actually had Matt Edmondson on the show. And I remember talking with him about how people often actually can't remember a brand that they bought from. And I've done this myself. I bought something. I loved it. I wanted more. And then I couldn't remember where I ordered it. I talked about this in the episode with Matt. I went back through my Gmail. I tried searching for the product, but the bottom line is if your customers can't remember you, a perfectly timed reorder reminder still might fall flat because they don't remember you and it's not recognizable. So to be recognizable, there's a lot of things you can do, but it starts with the unboxing experience needs to be memorable.

27:27The order confirmation, the wording you use, the imagery, the follow-up emails, Those aren't just fluff. They're what makes you memorable. It's your brand. And it's often what makes the reorder possible. So put your name where they'll see it. Send a personalized message. Tell them what they bought and play language, how it works. Just make it stupid easy for them to remember who you are so that when you send the nudge, they connect the dots instantly. Okay. Okay, so here's what I want you to do today. And it's very doable. So step one, get your reorder window from your cohort data, which we did in the last episode.