Emails are an effective, easy, and great way for companies to improve customer retention. More than 60 per cent of B2B marketers feel that email marketing is the best and most effective channel for revenue generation.
It is hard to win new customers and also keep the ones you have. It can cost nearly 16 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Customer retention is based on increasing customer engagement and deepening the connection of customers with your brand. Emails are used by marketers for their customer acquisition, traditionally.
Customer experience and customer service are necessary to focus and sustain the interest of customers. New customers are harder to convince and so one needs an effective marketing plan to convince them.
Email marketing helps specifically with customer retention as it is a great way to strengthen bonds with customers.
Instead of business owners relying on phones or events, sticking to email marketing can immensely help. This is where email marketing helps rapidly.
How does email marketing help in customer retention?
Email marketing is a simple effective strategy that converts prospects into customers through content. Marketing is all about attracting and retaining potential customers to your business.
When a prospect becomes a customer, they may have some doubts about the product. To make customers come back again and again, it is necessary to use some tactics.
The new marketing funnel is now focussed on post-purchase stages. The end goal is no longer to convert customers from a lead to a customer. It is beyond that.
Companies now want to maximise the lifetime value of loyal customers who will be repeat customers of the brand.
Email marketing offers a high degree of personalisation which is important for customer engagement. When customers are engaged, they will stick with the company as they understand the basic needs.
This increases customer lifetime value and improves long-term profitability.
With AI and big data, it is possible to discover what people prefer and recommend similar purchases. As per a research done by a whitepaper, more than 80 per cent of businesses relied on email marketing for customer retention.
Another survey by E-marketer discovered that nearly 60 per cent of marketers considered email marketing as an effective method of reaching customer retention goals.
7 Tips to improve customer retention via email marketing
To improve customer retention using email marketing, there are some tips every company can follow. Scaling customer messaging through emails can be highly helpful in coordinating with customers.
1. Use emails to send personalized messages to specific customers or groups
Aren’t boring emails tiring? How does it feel to wake up to at least five impersonalized emails every morning? It is tough to track customer actions and send relevant emails.
Using a good tool can help immensely in this. You can make sure your emails are relevant and personalized. To alleviate the pain point of irrelevant messaging, companies now use automation tools to adjust to high levels of personalization.
2. Emails as friendly reminders
Whenever a major event is on, a friendly reminder email can help. It is always helpful for customers to be invited to a live event. Sending friendly reminders about marketing activities will show you really care about your customers.
It is a great way to build customer engagement and improve customer health scores.
You can also send reminders for renewals due, new resources, webinars, blog posts, and more. Good emails will build customer loyalty and work to personally stop customers from leaving the company.
3. Give customers more control
Let customers decide if they want to receive promotional emails from you or not. Avoid making them go through the email marketing fatigue process. Give them a chance to set their own preferences.
Customers go through a long journey and their relationship with the brand may change over time. They will become less engaged and this can cause a problem.
If they have the power to choose, they will be the best judge of their relationship.
4. Create compelling content
Customer retention is based on nurturing relationships. With valuable and compelling content, you can build relationships with your customers. These can be interviews, blog posts, case studies or anything that inspires others.
It is a great soft selling technique. Customers can get many products via upselling cross-selling. This will engage customers by solving problems. It gives users the opportunity to get the best content.
With this, customers find themselves educated with the company products or services and more connected with the brand’s story than others. It can help unsatisfied customers from leaving the company.
5. Build your segmentation on customer activity
Make sure your customer lists are segmented. With a high level of segmentation, it is possible to slice the audience as per levels of retention. Segmenting customers will be helpful in improving the concepts of upselling or reselling.
Having categories like active users, fewer users, promoters, fans, etc can help. With the right emails, folks who are not as connected with the brand will learn more about it.
Research by Adage found that segmented, personalised emails will be the most important marketing capability in the future. Based on categories, you can send related content that will impact the users to react in a certain manner.
6. Use re-engagement email campaigns
If you interact less with your customers, the chances of them being connected are less. This can be due to various reasons. Engagement is a major factor that determines your credibility.
Re-engagement will help you not lose connection with customers. A study found that re-engagement campaigns have led to more than 90 per cent of inbox-placement rate.
To be less likely named as a spammer, it is necessary to be engaged with customers. An email directed at engagement must remind users about the benefits of the business, perks and more.
7. Use emails to send customer feedback surveys
Customer feedback is helpful to improve product or service designs. If a company is not aware of how customers feel, they cannot improve their offerings. Emails are a great way to get that information from your customers.
Emails can be tracked helping companies know who opened it. Emails allow for immediate feedback helping companies create easy processes to act on problems. Emails can be automated making it quick, easy, and feasible.
Customer feedback is important to make sure that companies make better versions of the product or service.
Bottom Line: Effective channel to increase customer retention
Emails have been used traditionally to drive customer acquisition. The new times call for better emails that are customer-driven. Customers get resistant to marketing and need to be allocated with time and resources.
With these tips, it is possible to improve customer retention. More retained customers will also help with an increase in customer happiness.
Having empathy for customers will be the first step in creating goodwill. With a good marketing strategy focused on customer satisfaction and personalisation, it will improve the chances of customer retention.
Emails can be a great way to improve customer relationships provided you send the right content. Promotional emails and stories will not help improve customer retention.
Personalized emails, content, discounts and more will improve what customers think of you.
