Marketing Examined - 🔍 Hostage Tape's Post Purchase Funnel

Hi everyone! Hope the warm spring air brings you a dose of joy.

As promised, we will continue to dive into the customer journey of Hostage Tape. The post-purchase tactics might be my personal favorite as it’s something less talked about but equally crucial to a brand’s success.

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The cha-ching sound rings. Another customer.

Yet this is just one milestone of the customer journey. Brands rarely survive on one-time purchasers.

While post-purchase upsells and resell flows are important and do work, we will not elaborate on those in this case study.

As we went through Hostage Tape’s post-purchase flow, we are reminded that there are other steps before you get to upsell.

Things you should do right after a customer’s purchase to guarantee customer success, to leverage them for your brand’s continuous growth.

Customer loyalty comes down to making sure customers get the value out of your product as you promised.

Right after purchase, on the order confirmation page, Hostage Tape shows a video of how to peel off the tape backing to start using the product.

Sounds insignificant, but as I started using the product, I realized that it’s difficult to peel off the backing if you don't follow the video instruction.

That frustration leads to friction which leads to customer turnover.

Next, Hostage Tape aims to collect zero-party data.

Which is data that your customers intentionally share with you, which helps you optimize your decisions beyond tools like Google Analytics.

So, Hostage Tape has a simple question post-purchase: “Which of the following led you to purchase today?”

Which helps Hostage Tape understand where to scale time and resources.

A quick example is if the post-purchase survey revealed that a particular channel resonated well with a specific customer segment with high LTV, you could prioritize targeting similar audiences through the same channel.

Another good question the founder of Lomi asked their customers post-purchase is: “What almost made you not buy?”. They use this data to optimize their content and site.

Before Hostage Tape lets their customer go, they invite customers to be part of their army - a.k.a joining their referral program.

The tactic is nothing groundbreaking, but there are two things I want to call out here that Hostage Tape does well.

• Spotlighting the referral program

Hostage Tape highlighted the program where there are the most eyeballs: the order confirmation page and the order confirmation email

• Giving the right incentive:

The key to an effective program is offering the incentive to motivate your customers to spread the word for you. Rather than giving $5 towards the next order, Hostage Tape offers $5 cash for every referral.

Customers are given a more appealing incentive, and the most loyal customers will spend money on Hostage Tape anyway. It’s a win-win.

For a small brand, a referral program is an economical way to acquire more customers and make existing customers stickier.

Two questions to ask yourself:

1. Are you making sure customers are aware of the program?
2. Are you structuring incentives in the most effective way?

The biggest takeaway from this case study, other than the specific tactics, is that Hostage Tape took advantage of the real estate on the confirmation page.

What’s special about it?

100% of customers see the page. The same applies to order confirmation emails.

Whatever tactics you implement, do it with a sense of urgency while you still have customers’ attention - we all know how quickly that fades away.

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On another note, would you try Hostage Tape? 

I'll keep you updated on how it works for me.

Chi & Alex