This article was updated in October 2022 to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information.
Your customers want transparency and dependability when they purchase products from your store. In other words, they want to know when they’ll receive their order and that it’ll show up when you say it does.
A recent Shopify survey has the data to back this up. Their Future of eCommerce report uncovered some interesting findings, including the fact that 45% of consumers said they want to see clearly anticipated delivery times for their orders. Basically, customers want to be kept in the loop.
This is where branded tracking pages and shipping notifications come into play. With these tools, you can give your customers complete visibility over where an order is in the delivery journey. Notifications (including email and SMS) ensure customers are never in the dark. And, as a retailer, you’ll end up seeing fewer “where are my parcel queries”.
So read on to learn more about when you should send shipping notifications, how to send them and see some real examples from retailers.
Shipping notifications keep customers informed about the status of their online order at every step of the delivery process.
Shipping notifications help to manage customer delivery expectations and give you an opportunity to communicate more with your customers. Primarily, their purpose is to provide the tracking number, but there are other opportunities for personalisation – which can do a lot for encouraging repeat purchases.
A benefit of shipping notifications is that you can build customer loyalty. Providing your customers with the tracking information allows customers to track their shipment, which in turn reduces the number of queries for your customer service team. Say goodbye to those pesky ‘where are my parcel enquiries?’.
“74% of customers say that receiving delivery updates increases the chances of them returning to shop again with the merchant.”
— Voxco Website Blog
You should send shipping notifications as soon as the order gets shipped out, including the estimated delivery date, tracking number and any other relevant details.
Shipping notifications can be sent via SMS or email. There are six touchpoints that you can personalise and notify your customer of their order status.
To work out how many shipping notifications to send, put yourself in the position of your customer. You want to ensure they’ve got all the information they need at the right stages of the delivery process, without overwhelming them. You also don’t want to send so few they feel ignored.
In Starshipit, we find that many businesses enable either printed or manifested customer notifications (these are triggered by actions in Starshipit), alongside one or two of the other touchpoints in the previous section. This ensures that the notifications are spread throughout the post-purchase journey, without overwhelming customers.
Another thing to remember is that you may already have notifications sent from your eCommerce platform (like Shopify) by default. You may want to consider disabling these when using the Starshipit notifications, to ensure customers don't receive double ups.
And, as always, experiment to see what works for your customers. You might want to adjust your mix of email and SMS notifications.
Setting up and then automatically sending shipping notifications is easy – especially when you use a platform like Starshipit.
With Starshipit, you can customise your email templates for each delivery status. Then, once you’ve connected your eCommerce platform and your couriers, you can automatically send emails and SMS notifications by simply ticking a box.
What do shipping notifications contain? By default, tracking notifications usually include information such as:
You can customise shipping notifications with company logos, headers and footers. This is easy using Starshipit’s template editor.
A branded tracking page is a landing page that you can direct your customers to from your shipping notifications. This allows customers to view all their order’s delivery information, including live tracking updates.
Branded tracking pages are a great tool for post-purchase engagement, and many retailers include their social channels, recommended products, community pages, loyalty programs or return policies.
You put a lot of effort into acquiring your customers, so it makes sense to keep them engaged after they’ve purchased from you. Instead of sending your customers to a courier tracking page, create your own. This will keep your brand top-of-mind throughout the shipping process.
There are multiple benefits of using branded tracking pages:
A branded tracking page should include:
To create a strong brand message, you should consider only using a maximum of two additional elements on your branded tracking page.
To improve the experience for your customers, your tracking pages should include:
You can grow brand loyalty by including the following on your tracking pages:
Incentivise customers to come back and buy from your store again by including some of the following elements:
Most importantly, always include a clear and simple way for the customer to contact you.
Now, let's explore some examples of real branded tracking pages in use today by eCommerce businesses – just like yours!
Urban Plant Growers use Starshipit’s Branded Tracking pages to grow their community and to share educational content about their products.
What makes it good:
Leading Aussie brand Oz Hair & Beauty use Starshipit’s Branded Tracking to share video content and drive cross-promotional messaging.
What makes it good:
It’s easy to setup your own branded tracking pages with a shipping platform like Starshipit. That’s because Starshipit integrates with your eCommerce platforms and couriers. This means you can focus on creating great tracking pages, instead of dealing with the technical stuff.
To get started, you’ll need to enable email notifications in your Starshipit settings. Head over to Settings > Customer Notifications to start (and remember to check which notifications are coming out of your eCommerce platform!).
Included in the email notification will be a tracking URL link that directs customers to your branded tracking page instead of the default courier page.
You can customise your branded tracking page directly from the Starshipit dashboard using our user-friendly editing tool. This is where you can add your logos, links and text.
You can also read the guide on our support centre:
Read our guideOnce you’ve customised your branded tracking page, it basically lives as web page that your customers access through the shipping notifications you send to them via email or SMS. This means you need to use the notifications first and then set up branded tracking.
The branded tracking page is a web page and the URL link is sent to customers via shipping notifications using email or SMS.
This means you need to use the notifications first and then set up branded tracking.
You may be thinking: “My eCommerce platform and couriers already have notifications and tracking pages built in, why should I use another software solution?”.
Beyond needing to manage notifications and tracking pages across multiple platforms and couriers, there are a few key reasons.
So that’s shipping notifications and branded tracking. We've linked to quite a few guides which explain these features in more detail, but to try them for yourself why not sign up for a 30-day free trial? Our friendly support team will be more than happy to help you set everything up.
Oh, and remember – shipping notifications and branded tracking are just one of the many benefits of shipping automation, which can add value throughout the fulfilment process.
Automate your entire shipping process while delivering better experiences for your customers.
Shipping emails: The best examples, with free templates
The 5 C’s of post-purchase
8 amazing examples of order tracking + emails