Write post-purchase emails

A good post-purchase sequence has three to five emails after the order and shipping notices, and each one does a different job. The exact set depends on your products, but most stores need some version of these:

1. The welcome. Sent around the time the package arrives. It thanks the customer briefly and tells them the one thing to do first, such as "let your new plant sit for a week before you repot it."
2. The care email. Sent once they've started using the product. It answers the question most customers have at that point, such as how often to water, how to clean a cast-iron pan, or how to store a coffee bag once it's open.
3. The check-in. Sent after they've had time to form an opinion. It asks how it's going and invites a reply, a photo, or a review, because a customer who had a problem would rather tell you than leave a bad review.
4. The next step. Sent when the customer is likely to need something else. That could be a refill, a matching accessory, or the product most customers buy second.

Kite doesn't send all four to every customer by default. It decides from your products. A store selling skincare may need a care email and a refill reminder but no setup email. A store selling espresso machines may need two setup emails before anything else.

Kite reads your Shopify or WooCommerce orders to see what each customer bought, in what combination, and what they bought next. That tells Kite two things it needs before it writes anything: which products deserve their own care emails, and which product most often becomes the second purchase.

Say you run a houseplant shop. Kite might find that most first orders are a single plant, that a third of repeat customers come back for plant food, and that a decorative pot is the most common second purchase. That gives the sequence its shape. The care emails cover the plant, and the last email suggests the pot or the food at the moment the customer would plausibly want it.

Kite then groups customers by what they bought. In Shopify, it tags them, so a group like first-time monstera buyers stays visible in your store. In Mailchimp, it can tag contacts and build a segment for each group. If your store is connected to Mailchimp, Kite can also read what each customer bought from Mailchimp's store data. In Brevo, it reads contacts by list, segment, or the attributes you track.

Kite plans each email around what the customer is doing with the product at that moment, not around a fixed number of days after the order. Before it writes, it maps the sequence: when each email lands, what the customer has and hasn't done by then, and the one thing that email is for.

For the houseplant shop, the map for a new plant might look like this:

• Delivery day. The plant has just come out of a dark box. The email tells the customer where to put it and not to repot or fertilize it yet.
• About ten days later. This is when most customers first wonder whether they're watering too much. The email shows how to check the soil before watering.
• About three weeks later. The plant has either settled in or it hasn't. The email asks how it's doing and invites a photo or a question.
• About six weeks later. The plant is growing and will soon outgrow its nursery pot. The email suggests the pot that fits it and the plant food that keeps it going.

Timing works best when it starts from delivery rather than the order date. In Shopify, Kite reads each order's fulfillment status and tracking, so it can time the first email to the day the package arrives. Every email in the map gives the customer something the one before didn't. If two emails could swap their bodies without anyone noticing, Kite merges them into one.

Send care tips in a short email that covers only the product the customer bought, at the point they're starting to use it. A general "how to care for your plants" newsletter goes unread. A note that says "your fiddle-leaf fig will probably drop a leaf or two this week, and here's why that's fine" gets opened, because it answers a worry the customer has right now.

Kite writes each care email from the real details of the product. In Shopify, many stores keep care instructions, materials, or ingredients in custom product fields called metafields, which their theme shows on the product page. Kite reads those fields along with the product description and what it learned about your products during onboarding. It can also read public reviews of your products to find the questions and complaints customers raise most often.

For a large catalog, Kite writes one care email per product family rather than one per product. A store with 300 plants might need care emails for tropical plants, succulents, and ferns, each pulling in the specific plant's name. If Kite notices that your care details are missing or thin on some products, it can write them and add them to those product fields in Shopify, so the product pages improve along with the emails.

Kite writes in your brand voice and often suggests a plain email signed by a real person, because a short note from the owner of a small shop reads like advice, not an ad. Every draft gets a review pass for wording that sounds machine-written before you see it.

Post-purchase emails help with repeat sales by making the first purchase go well and then naming the right next product at the right time. A customer whose plant died isn't buying a second one, no matter what discount you send. A customer whose plant is thriving is ready to hear about the pot it needs.

So Kite saves the selling for the end of the sequence and makes it specific. The last email suggests the product your order history shows customers most often buy next, at the point they're likely to need it. When a product runs out on a predictable schedule, such as coffee, skincare, or plant food, Kite times that email to how fast customers use it up. That overlaps with sending reorder reminders, which Kite also handles as its own job.

When an offer makes sense, Kite sets it up in your store. In Shopify, it adds codes to a discount you've already created, up to 100 at a time, so each customer gets their own code and you can see which ones were used. It can also issue a gift card to a specific customer, which works well as a thank-you to someone who left a detailed review. Kite only uses offers you've approved, and it doesn't invent deadlines to create urgency.

Kite sets up the sequence so every new customer gets it without anyone pressing send. How it does that depends on your email tool.

• In Mailchimp, Kite writes the emails as templates, builds the segments, and can start or pause a classic automation or add a specific customer to an automation email's queue. If you've built a Customer Journey that starts from an API trigger, Kite can start that journey for each new customer.
• In Brevo, Kite writes and updates the email templates that your Brevo automations send. You build the automation in Brevo, and Kite keeps the emails in it current.
• From your Kite team address, Kite can run the sequence itself. It checks your new orders every day on a schedule, finds the customers who are due for each email, and sends them. It can also start the moment an order comes in, because Shopify and WooCommerce can both notify a web address Kite gives you whenever a new order is placed.

By default, Kite asks for your approval before it sends email. When Kite sends the sequence itself, you can approve each day's batch, or give Kite more autonomy once you trust the emails. When your email tool runs the automation, you approve the emails once and the tool sends them from then on.

Kite leaves out anyone who shouldn't get the email. It skips customers your email tool marks as unsubscribed, anyone your CRM marks that way, and anyone who asked in an earlier reply to stop hearing from you.

Kite measures a post-purchase sequence by how many customers order again and how soon, not by how many opened the email. Opens tell you whether a subject line worked. Second orders tell you whether the sequence worked.

Kite reads results in two places. From your email tool, it reads opens, clicks, replies, and unsubscribes for each email, and in Mailchimp with a connected store, the orders and revenue each email brought in. From Shopify or WooCommerce, it reads the orders that came in from the customers who got the sequence, including any discount code they used.

That turns into a recommendation. If customers who got the watering email reorder at a higher rate than those who didn't, the care emails are earning their place. If the check-in email draws lots of replies about the same problem, Kite suggests adding the answer to an earlier email or to the product page. Kite records what worked in your knowledge base, so the next round of edits starts from your own results.