How To Use Email Marketing To Retain Customers
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Guest post by Jana
So, you just made a new online sale to a first-purchase customer. Congratulations! Beyond the nice boost in revenue, you received a golden nugget of information that will generate your business a ton of recurring revenue to come: your customer’s email address.
What’s next?
It’s natural to want to generate additional growth with new customers. However, your best customers are the ones who have previously purchased from you, since they’ve seen value in your product or service and already know your brand. So what’s the secret to getting these customers to convert again? Email marketing.
5 Email Marketing Retention Strategies
Here are just a few strategies on how to use email marketing campaigns to retain customers:
1) Rewards Programs: Starting a rewards program can be as simple as, buy 10 get one free. To make your customer feel extra special, you can count their first purchase as two. Airlines and hotels do this with their miles and points programs. They offer double or triple points for your first purchase and the points expire if you don’t purchase a flight or room again within a reasonable time frame, like 18 months. Here’s an example of United’s Mileage Plus program, for example, that operates on the 18 month expiration schedule.
2) Thank You Promotional Code: As a thank you for your customer’s first purchase or sign-up, offer him or her a promotional code that provides a special discount or freebie that can be redeemed with his/her next purchase. It’s good to add an expiration date so you can follow up if he/she hasn’t used it. Give a reasonable amount of time for your customer to see the value in the product or service he/she initially purchased. 2-3 months should be plenty of time for the code to expire.
3) Contests: Hosting the occasional contest is a great way to get your customers excited about your brand. With contests, you can also take the opportunity to get more information about your customer by asking detailed questions as part of the entry process. You can present a quick survey that asks him/her what types of products or services are most valuable, giving you additional targeting information for future email campaigns. You may also want to ask for a birth date, which leads me to my next strategy.
4) Birthday Freebie: This promotion should make the birthday boy or girl feel special. Send an attractive offer — such as a freebie without restrictions. Since these promotions are date-specific and free, I encourage a tighter expiration date on these (up to 1 week past the birthday).
5) Reminders: When running rewards programs, contests, or promotional codes that have deadlines or expiration dates, make sure to send a series of reminder emails to alert them when their points will expire. In order to do this successfully, think about the decision making cycle and start the series of emails early enough to give your customers ample time to evaluate and act on your offering.
These are just a few of the strategies I’ve used in the past to retain customers and build a loyal fan base. What email strategies have you used in the past to retain your best customers?
Jana Fung, guest author of this post, is the Marketing Manager of MixRank, a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank, you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites.