4 Ways to Improve Customer Retention with Email Marketing

With increased competition, retaining customers has become a challenge for new-age businesses. In modern-day scenarios, it is a nerve-wracking task to retain or re-convince a customer to buy your products. This is called customer churn and it is when a customer ends his/her relation with a brand and decides not to buy anything belonging/relating to that brand.

Most companies focus only on finding or catching new customers. That’s a perfect example of an aggressive and confident marketing plan. Though, with this approach, they do not really get time to take care of their existing customers - the ones that are already convinced and likely to buy again from them.

Did you know that there is a good 32% chance that your first-time customer will again buy from you? Moreover, it is 53% more likely that your second-time customer will buy again from you.

However, it is not as easy as it looks. You will need to send them effective advertorials through engaging email or other marketing channels to help them take informed buying decisions and re-convince them to buy from you.

Customer Retention through Email Marketing

There is no denying that customer churn happens with every company – no matter how cool your product or customer service is. You cannot control it. And it happens for several reasons, such as:  

However, you can surely work on to retain your customers with your strategic, customer-centric marketing campaigns. You can send them relevant product offers that fit into their exact and immediate requirements. And, that is how you show that you remember them and you care for them by sending them the relevant product and offers they might be interested in.

Amid the dominance of social media and other marketing channels, email marketing continues to be the most effective and in-use way of marketing. In fact, it is the most powerful marketing channel that returns $44 for each $1 spent.

This blog suggests 5 best ways to help you retain customers with email marketing –

1. Database Segmentation

Most email marketers are still not aware of or do not have a segmented customer database. Database segmentation is a practice that involves dividing your large database into small groups on the basis of various factors such as age, sex, buying preferences, location, etc.

Segmenting your data allows you to create better offers for a specific group of audience. For a multinational organization, such as Beard Bros, it is important to pitch the right offer to the right audience.

For Beard Bros, there is no point sending beard gel ads to boys who don’t have beards. There is a well-defined buyer group (men above 16) for this brand. They, of course, have a marketing plan in place for boys looking to grow beard.

Likewise, Beard Bros must not send marketing emails meant for these boys to those men who have recently purchased accessories for a well-grown beardy look. The best practice, here, is to create, segment, or re-segment your database based on various factors mentioned above.

Each company has different products and diverse buyer groups. Divide your database and develop your email marketing content strategy per your segmented data.

Database segmentation enables your marketing department to send the right email to the right audience at the right time. It allows your emails to stay relevant and gives you a chance to understand the needs of your customers, offer products that are actually needed, deliver superior service and retain your customers. Additionally, sectioning your customer database increases click-through rate (CTR), engagement, and page visits.

Here are some of the best practices to quickly segment your database and boost the performance of your email marketing campaign.

2. Send Welcome Email

Imagine entering a showroom and no salesperson approaches to welcome you!

Experience is the same when a user signs up on your website or app, you don’t even bother to send him/her a welcome email. Welcome emails build your first impression on your users.

Recommended: The Pros and Cons of Moving Closer to Effective email Marketing

So, welcome emails are important.

Welcome emails have become an essential ingredient in convincing prospects to buy. Even though among the most overlooked emails, welcome emails are your first chance to create an impression on your customers and help them understand your brand, offerings, and the benefits of choosing your brand.

Reassure your users that their personal and financial data are safe with you. It helps build trust during the initial phase.

3. Push Cart Notification

Informing your users about the abandoned cart or un-bought items in their cart could help you re-attract your customers to buy from you.

Most of the customer add items in their cart, and leave your website and never return. You can leverage push notifications through your app or email to remind them about the items in their cart.

Cart notification emails are short and sent with a clear intention to remind the customer about their cart. So, they should act and be written just like a reminder note. These emails encourage the recipient to review and buy the items in their cart.

There should be no additional product offers in the email. However, to retain such customers, you could give them some offers – such as free shipping – if you want.

4. Offer Loyalty Benefits

Loyal and returning customers can help your business grow faster!

Here also, database segmentation has a play. You will need to crosscheck your database to identify and send offers to your loyal customers – the customers that have been frequently buying from you over a period of time.

Segment your customers based on their buying history and patterns and codify an email marketing campaign to re-encourage them to buy from you one more time. This will be a buyer-specific email, in which you will be offering them some exclusive loyalty benefits such as a gift or a discount offer.

Tailor your content that matches the expectation and preferences of your customers well. It is imperative as 90% of the customers like emails that are sent to “just to them”.

Personalizing the content or offers in your email campaigns makes the customers feel that you care of them.

What if a customer (from your loyal customer database segment) clicks on the buy link in your email? You would need to create a landing page that will display those offers and that would be accessible for that user only. You will need to implement an extension to create personalized your product pages and advanced shipping options on your product page for such users.

With the help of loyalty programs combined with your strong email marketing pitch and personalized landing page layout, you can develop/strengthen the emotional connection with your existing customers. Doing so will be a major support to your customer retention efforts.

Bottom Line:

If there is anything that is more important than customer retention, it is keeping your database up-to-date and duly segmented by measuring the performance of each of your campaigns.

Apart from that, you should also perform periodic audits on your website to check if your website’s plug-ins and add-ons for example shipping suite, SEO extension, and search extension are working to your expectations.

The key is to offer your users a safe, secure and most importantly, a superior experience on your website. If your customers feel safe and happy trading with you, and you have a great product to offer, then they are already convinced and will be interested in buying from you over and over again.

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