How To Improve Customer Retention Through Email Marketing
Customer retention is one of the most important elements of successful company operations. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your existing customers.
To make sure your customers remain loyal and continue increasing their LTV (Customer Lifetime Value), you need to help them succeed with your company. To do that, it’s imperative to improve the quality of communication.
Email is an effective communication channel that opens up tremendous marketing possibilities. Streamlining your email marketing efforts can help you increase retention and maximize revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at improving customer retention through email marketing.
1. Recover Inactive Customers
Many customers make one purchase from your company and stay dormant for many months or even years. Since you have their email address, you can use any opportunity to recover these sources of revenue quickly and effectively.
By designing a high-quality recovery email, you can bring a customer back. All you have to do is catch their attention once again. Some companies choose to send appealing offers, based on the customer’s information and history with the company.
Before sending a recovery email, it’s imperative to check if the email address is still active. One of the ways to do it is by using an email verifier. This software can provide information about email addresses on your list to keep you from sending messages that never reach the recipient.
2. Segment Existing Customers
Email marketing tactics allow you to target several groups of your target audience simultaneously. All you have to do is segment them by preferences, needs, buying behavior, and other relevant categories.
When you use a personalized approach to designing emails for each customer segment, you improve your chances of satisfying your existing customers.
For example, sending a promotional offer for a discount on a specific product may be suitable for just one category of your audience. Sending this offer to your entire email list can be counterproductive.
Research shows that customers are willing to pay more for a more personalized approach. Email marketing can help you do just that.
3. Create Valuable Content
The success of your email marketing strategy heavily depends on the type of content you provide. To retain customers, you can share valuable content that:
- Educates them about products and services
- Provides insight into the industry
- Helps them get to know your team better
- Solve their immediate needs
Newsletters, e-books, case studies, social media posts, and any other type of content you create can improve the power of your emails. If your customers constantly receive high-quality information from your side, they are more likely to stay with your company for a long time.
4. Get Feedback
Emails are an excellent tool for getting feedback from your customers. This direct channel of communication is highly likely to reach the respondent and initiate action. You can create surveys that a customer can fill out within an interactive email. This can significantly increase the number of answers you get.
Upon receiving replies and analyzing feedback, consider getting back to your customers with a response. Show them how you’ve considered their recommendations, complaints, and reviews.
Using customer feedback to make improvements increases customer engagement and boosts loyalty. Such loyal customers become the best brand ambassadors.
You can even set up automated survey emails that go out after a customer purchases a product, stays inactive for over a week, contacts customer service, and more. These surveys can help you gather more information about your audience and design better customer retention strategies.
5. Converse With Your Customers
One of the main tactics that help keep customers with your brand is a strong relationship that drives engagement. To achieve that, you need to have an ongoing conversation with your customers.
Email marketing can help you do just that by helping you learn more about these people and talk to them through regular messages.
While promotional emails are a great way to make money, you need to remember that customers aren’t money machines. That’s why some of your messages shouldn’t promote anything. They can include valuable “just because” content.
6. Implement Upselling and Cross-Selling
Upselling and cross-selling tactics are excellent ways to increase your revenue. They also show your customers that you know their needs. Once you study the target audience’s requirements, buyer behavior, and willingness to pay, you can create upselling and cross-selling emails.
These emails can demonstrate your care for the customer and help build loyalty. The more targeted such messages are, the more likely they are to streamline customer retention.
7. Improve Communication
Communication with your existing customers is an integral part of your customer retention strategy. You need to provide high-quality channels of communication that allow a customer to contact you at any convenient time.
Email marketing creates an effective communication option. You can send customer retention emails, encouraging the respondent to offer suggestions, ask for information, provide reviews, and much more. The more often you speak to your audience, the more likely it is to continue a relationship with your business.
Types of Customer Retention Emails
Each email you send to your customers can become a retention tool. The key to this approach is creating a comprehensive email-sending plan.
Showering your current customers with messages is likely to have a counterproductive effect. However, sending the right emails at the right time can improve customer satisfaction levels and increase customer retention.
Here are a few emails that can help improve retention:
- Welcome emails – as soon as the customer registers on your website or signs up for the newsletter, you need to send a welcome email. These messages serve several purposes, to remind the customer about registration, confirm the signup, and allow them to opt out if necessary.
- Birthday emails – if the customer shares their birth date, make sure to send them an email with congrats. Don’t forget to give them a gift. A discount or a freebie goes a long way toward achieving retention and improving customer experience.
- Holiday emails – take the time to wish your customers happy holidays. Gifts also come highly appreciated. A holiday email is a legit way to remind disengaged customers about your company and bring them back on board.
- Thank you emails – make sure to thank customers for being with your company, purchasing products, participating in surveys, and whatever else they do to help you.
- Abandoned cart emails – these reminder emails can help a customer return the purchase they may have accidentally abandoned. An extra incentive to complete the purchase comes highly appreciated.
These emails can help build a closer relationship with your customers, streamline awareness, boost loyalty, and improve your customer retention strategy.
How to Write Great Customer Retention Emails
Making email marketing a part of your customer retention strategies begins with creating an efficient message. Here are a few tips to help you write an email that encourages loyalty.
1. Be Straightforward
Don’t add any fluff to your customer retention email so it looks fancy. Get straight to the point. Otherwise, you could lose the customer at “hello.” Focus on the recipient’s needs from the first sentences and give them a tool to solve a problem.
You should only have one CTA in your customer retention email. Otherwise, you can confuse the reader and keep them from taking action.
2. Improve Your Subject Line
A subject line is your first and often the only opportunity to help the customer decide to open your email message. That’s why you should work on engaging, informative, and concise subject lines.
A catchy subject line keeps your retention email from ending up in the trash can while helping the customer become more aware of your brand.
3. Add Personalization
Ideally, you should be crafting a separate personalized retention message for each client. However, if you have a large email list, you would have to focus on customer segments to come up with relevant content.
With the right email marketing software, you can add customer names to each email. This can help you make a connection and strengthen customer relationships.
4. Focus on Value
The key to retaining customers is providing them with something of value. When creating a message, make sure to emphasize the value of the product or service you are offering.
When talking about this value, put it in the same sentence as the customer’s pain point. This can help them see your brand as a solution to their problem.
Implementing Customer Retention Tactics into Email Marketing Strategies
Customers are your most valuable assets. When they succeed after using your products and services, your business succeeds too. If you help a customer achieve success, they are likely to stay with your company for many years.
Using email marketing can help you improve the customer retention rate, build customer loyalty, and turn customers into brand ambassadors. All you need to do is take a special approach to the email campaign.
