11 Ways to Retain Customers with Email Marketing
Customer retention is one of the key factors that distinguishes growing companies from stagnating ones. The more customers you have maintained a relationship with and to whom you regularly sell, the higher your stability.For sales professionals, the number one priority is finding new ways to increase revenue. To do this, you need to sell more, to more customers.
As a result, salespeople are so focused on finding new customers that they cannot effectively meet the needs of existing ones. However, it is much wiser to retain a loyal audience. Selling to a regular customer is 5-25 times cheaper, and its probability is 60-70% versus 5-20% for new customers.
Here are some practical customer retention strategies. They are useful because they provide long-term loyalty and high satisfaction to existing customers. This, in turn, is the key to business growth.
What is a customer retention strategy for?
The most common mistake companies make around the world is that they think that if they have a great product or service, customers will stay with them by default.While this does happen in some cases, the harsh truth is that this is just a short-term strategy. The even harsher truth is that sooner or later, customers may simply leave. At first glance, for no reason.
If you stop interacting with customers, they will feel that they are no longer cared for. You need to continually continue to earn customer loyalty.Having an effective communication strategy makes it possible to identify customers who are most likely to become loyal. You can track them and sell them more. This makes them a long-term source of income.
Email marketing
Personalized newsletters are the best way to keep in touch with your customers. First, you should make a distinction between triggered and regular mailings.
You can start by sending notifications about the actions taken - for example, a letter confirming registration, subscription, notification of receiving a private message, reminder of a forgotten basket, notification of sending an order.Send new customers a series of introductory messages - do onboarding. Thanks to them, new customers should quickly and easily understand the essence of the product and how to use it, be it an online clothing store or highly specialized software.
Regular mailings solve the problem of increasing audience loyalty. You can share the following content with your customers:
1. Educational content;
2. Expert opinions;
3. Digests;
4. Offers from partners;
5. Promotions and discounts;
6. Personal suggestions;
In this way, you increase customer confidence and provide them with additional value, which encourages them to come back for shopping just to you.
When designing your email marketing strategy, it is important to carefully segment your audience. Track user behavior, identify factors that affect business profit.
Even if your customers don't leave reviews, you should actively engage with them. Regular mailings and activation emails help to establish trusting communication. This way you show expertise, increase customer satisfaction, and you can make individual offers, upselling and cross-selling.
Marketing automation tools like CRM allow you to keep a history of communications. You will know when a customer last contacted you, and you can take action if there has been no interaction for a long time. This makes it easier to launch advertising campaigns. For example, if a customer's subscription is about to expire, you can send an email notifying them to renew their account.
Personalization
In the course of regular communication, it is also important to contact the client directly and take into account individual facts about him in the message - for example, when forming a list of recommended products. Clients always differ in dozens of parameters. Depending on the influence of each factor on the profit of the business, customers can be categorized and a specific communication strategy can be defined for each.
For example, one of the segmentation parameters is the frequency of purchases. By separating those who purchase from you monthly from those whose last purchases were made six months or a year ago, you will formulate more appropriate messages for each of the customer groups. Loyal customers won't get a weird "flashy" offer from a reactivation series, and rare buyers won't get those unique rewards that are prepared for a loyal audience.
CRM
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a marketing direction that serves to build business relationships with customers. The CRM system serves as a basic tool.This software is designed for centralized collection of information about customers and their characteristics:
- Personal data of clients: name and surname, contact information, age, etc.
- Purchase history: products, dates, amounts, payment methods, platforms;
- Communication history: support calls, incoming and outgoing calls and letters to managers, sent mailings;
- Sales dynamics by product, company division, and so on;
- The effectiveness of managers: who sold how much, to whom, what products.
Also, CRM integrates with external services to provide a higher level of service and analytics. For example, you can integrate them with call tracking - and then a record of each call will appear in the profile of each client, as well as detailed information about which channel the client came from, what campaign attracted him.