You should see a healthy spike in sales on your product launch day. But if all goes well, these sales will continue and inspire repeat sales and customer loyalty. In order to achieve this, the post-launch phase is critical. There are a number of things you need to do once the product launch phase begins to die down.

Thank Everyone

Take some time to thank all of the people who have helped you make your product launch a success. Thank your channel of affiliates, your partners, bloggers who have written about your product, and influencers who have supported you and helped to get the word out. While thanking them, provide data that shows how their efforts have helped you. Give them any feedback that might be useful for them. Pay commissions to affiliates either right away or in a timely fashion at the time appointed on your schedule.

Ask for Customer Feedback

Post-sale is an essential time for customer feedback. Once your customers have bought and started to use the product, you need to know how they feel about it. There are a number of ways to gather customer feedback. One is to conduct surveys through email or social media. You can select individual customers for direct feedback and stories about your product. You can use this feedback to make improvements and also to better understand the relationship of your market to your product. Keep monitoring online for mentions of your name. This is a form of indirect feedback.

Update Instructional Materials

Once the product has launched and you’ve received actual questions and concerns from your customers, you need to update your instructional materials. Update your tutorials, FAQs, and other teaching materials with these new questions.

Keep Searching for Opportunities

Now that your product is up and selling, you should keep looking for opportunities to promote it to new potential customers. Although you spent a good deal of time doing this pre-launch to identify the best channels and strategies, there are always other opportunities that either didn’t present themselves at the time, or that you had simply missed.

Follow-up

Create and implement a system for following up with your customers. This is very important for customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. It looks bad for a company if a customer has bought from them and then disappears once the sale is made. Furthermore, you can leverage this first sale for more sales in the future. The customer is now a highly-qualified buyer.

The best way to follow up with customers is through email. Other channels such as social media are good and should be used as well, but email is still the most personal way to connect and research shows it gets the best results.

The point-of-sale is a great opportunity to gain customer emails if you don’t already have them. Send the customer emails checking up on them and seeing if they’re happy; offering continued support in case they run into problems or have questions; teaching them how to make further use of your product for even better results; informing them of updates; and telling them success stories from other customers.

Ongoing Support

Make sure that at every communication touch-point your customers know that you’re there offering support if they need it. Ongoing customer support is a major factor in customer satisfaction and retention.

Keep Watching Metrics

After your initial product launch, sales will most likely decline at least somewhat. The decline could be dramatic, but this is to be expected. However, as you’re still looking for opportunities to sell and your product is still out there, watch your metrics carefully and see if there’s a correlation between sales and some event or source of traffic.

For example, you might see a sudden unexpected spike in sales a few weeks after your launch. When you check traffic sources, you see that a blogger you hadn’t reached out to has blogged a good review of your product. This is a great opportunity to reach out to this blogger and suggest other ways the two of you can help each other.

Gather and Use Social Proof

“Social proof” is customer-created content in the form of reviews and testimonials. It’s very valuable because it shows potential customers that you’re trustworthy and your product is worth buying. Post-launch, you should be looking for any type of social proof that you can use for your next launch or other content.

A good review by a blogger or another third party is an example of social proof. You can also elicit testimonials from happy customers. There are several ways to do this. The most effective is to contact any customer that praises your product, either privately through a personal email or publicly on social media. Ask them if you can use their testimonial directly for future promotions.

You can also elicit social proof by offering a small incentive, such as a discount or free content. However, you don’t want to feel like you’re bribing people to say something nice. Only ask truly happy customers to leave social proof. You can also offer those who leave social proof a link back to their site, which helps them get more exposure.

Celebrate with Your Team AND Your Customers

Take some time after your launch to celebrate your success both with your team and with your customers. For your customers, you can hold online events or give away freebies or discounts to say thanks. Focus on making it fun and making sure that your customers understand that you appreciate them.

Start Preparing for Your Next Launch

Once the excitement dies down from your product launch, it’s time to start thinking about your next one. Take all of the data and notes you’ve gathered and get started on your next pre-launch.