The Most Effective Ways to Increase Customer Retention With Email Marketing

Your marketing strategies shouldn’t stop attracting customers. The real marketing starts when you have to retain them. A large percentage of a company’s sales is taken from profit derived from loyal customers. This is why it’s crucial for a company to exert great effort into customer retention.

What is customer retention?

Customer retention refers to the activities you perform to increase the number of repeating clients. Acquiring customers is one thing, but keeping them actively engaged is how you truly maximize your customer value. Customer retention is very important for companies who already have a good client volume. If the business is just starting out, it would be wiser to focus on acquisition. But, in this case, you just have to appeal to your existing customers before they slip through your fingers.

How can you boost customer retention?

While there isn’t any one-size-fits-all way of gaining full customer retention (it greatly depends on your kind of business and your clients), there are some strategies that have been proven to retain current customers to a degree. Few of them are:

1. Using customer accounts
2. Improving customer service
3. Starting a customer loyalty program
4. Sending marketing emails
5. Offering discounts or credits to return

All of these are excellent methods, but if you already have loyal customers, then your main goal would be to increase their purchase frequency. To do this, you’re going to have to focus on email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is one of the best ways to turn old shoppers into loyal customers. In fact, 80% of brands use email marketing to boost their customer retention. Email marketing is simply more personal and more direct than other methods of marketing. And surprisingly, people actually enjoy receiving emails from their favorite companies.

What kinds of emails drive retention?

• Welcome E-mails

This is your time to make a good first impression on your customer. Doing this successfully will make them come back for more. In your welcome email, you need to introduce your brand, show off any of your new offers (especially if you mentioned an offer in your sign-up form), and invite them to follow you on all of your social media channels. You could even add your most recent Instagram posts at the bottom of your email to make it look more attractive and inviting.

Some welcome emails also include simple polls which you can use to create a follow-up email that’s tailored to their preference. For instance, if your customer responds that she shops for shoes over bags online, then you might send her a follow-up email based on her answer.

• Cart Recovery E-mails

Some online shoppers add items to their cart, leave the website, and forget about the full cart. To retailers, this is a lost opportunity for profit. Cart recovery emails are short, straight to the point, and act as gentle reminders. These emails aim to encourage the customers to review their carts and complete the purchases.

• Loyalty E-mails

Making your customers feel appreciated is one way of making them stay. Loyalty emails can include reward programs, offers that are especially just for them, and even provide them with your own curated list of items they might want to purchase.

• Post-purchase E-mails

Based on your customer’s most recent purchase, you can send them a customized email that includes products they might be interested in. This gives you a higher chance of profit, and it makes your customer feel valued. In addition, post-purchase emails are a great way of waking up customers who haven’t been active in a long time. A simple, “You might enjoy this product!” subject line can work.

Tools you can use to write effective e-mails:

Need help writing effective customer retention e-mails? There are some useful tools online that you can use.

1. MailMentor – This is a free tool that tells you if your email is reader-friendly. It analyzes how much time it would take to read the email, as well as make some recommended changes.
2. Boomeranggmail – This tool can help to schedule emails. Your emails will be sent at the most convenient time.
3. Writing Papers – A professional writing service that has writers who specialize in email writing. Useful for both long and short emails to ensure that you get the best response from your customers.
4. Grammarly – Get rid of grammatical errors with this free tool. You can also download the Chrome extension to save you time.

Conclusion

One of your company’s greatest assets are your customers. They are part of your brand and your service. Focusing your time on their experience and improving relations with this group is an effective and powerful way of getting more profit and establishing your name in the game.

About the author:

Lucy Benton is a specialist in digital marketing and content writing who currently works at www.assignmenthelper.com.au. She focuses mostly on the worlds of technology, gadgets, and the Internet.  If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Twitter.