The vast majority of digital marketing techniques are focused on outreach and the initial customer conversion. However, once a customer buys from you once… then what? Do you really need to start all that effort over again to convert them a second time? Of course not.
Once you have converted a lead into a paying customer, the game changes. Your priority becomes not conversion, but customer retention.
Customer retention is the art of inspiring once-time customers to come back as second-time customers and then welcome them back many times in the future as valued repeat customers.
In the effort of cultivating customer retention, no tool is more important than email. Sending emails to your customers is essential to reminding them of their first positive experience and giving once-converted customers a reason to come back and buy from you again.
Today, we’re here to share four email essentials for engendering brand loyalty and customer retention.
1. Send Weekly or Monthly Emails
First step: Don’t send daily emails. Emails sent from your brand should not arrive more often than emails from a friend or coworker. Emails that arrive every day seem spammy even when they are packed with interesting content and tempting deals.
Instead, stretch out your emailing schedule to weekly or monthly, depending on your product and customer demographics. Ideally, you want customers looking forward to your emails, but not drowning in emails they haven’t yet opened.
2. Emails Provide Both Interest and Value
The content of your emails also matters a great deal. Just sending an email is a good starting point, it can get eyes and thoughts pointed back in your direction.
But emails that are fluff or spam will soon be relegated to the Spam folder never to be seen or thought about again. Worse, empty-content emails risk annoying customers and damaging your carefully built initial conversion.
Instead, make sure that every single email you send has something interesting for your customers. Content, words and pictures that your subscribers will truly appreciate opening, not just your ad-page spread. Give them something of value. Useful career advice, back to school saving strategies, or interesting industry news in addition to whatever deals you’re also promoting.
3. Send Birthday and Holiday Greetings
Your CRM is a powerful ally in email marketing as well. The more you know about a customer, the more you can custom-tailor their email experience to be pleasing and persuasive. One very effective way to use your CRM is to send birthday and holiday greetings. Birthday emails are particularly effective. Give your subscribers a special birthday-month discount. Encourage them to treat themselves to something nice for their birthday, even if it isn’t on the exact day.
The best approach is to send a birthday email at the beginning of the birthday month with a special deal or discount and keep that deal open until the end of the month. This gives your birthday customers time to make a decision and treat themselves even if they’re busy on the exact day in question.
Holiday greetings can work in a similar way, and you may even be able to use your CRM to determine which holidays matter most to each individual customers.
4. Use Your CRM to Provide Personalised Deals and Content
Hand-in-hand with holiday greetings is personalised deals and content. Use your CRM for every template-designed email to fill in the content with things each individual customer will love. If your CRM has noted that a customer prefers items in green, or they have a passion for kitchen gadgets, then use that to offer special deals on green kitchen gadgets when you send promotional emails and specialised discounts.
Personalised deals and content make email marketing all the more tempting for your subscribers because you are offering things that each individual customer finds desirable based on their shopping habits in the past. If you offer articles and content, consider custom-tailoring those highlighted in each email based on what customers have clicked and read in the past.
Email marketing is a fantastic way to keep your customer engaged and significantly improve customer retention after that first hard-won conversion.
Contact us today for more insights into custom-tailoring your email marketing campaign with automated marketing and your CRM to get the best possible results.
