Email marketing is much more than sending messages to your customer’s inbox. 59% of marketers believe it is the most cost-effective channel for raising profits. The best part of email marketing is that it helps retain your customers and increases repeat purchases leading to low churn rates.
Customer retention is crucial for every business. It costs less to retain a customer than acquire a new one. Yet, companies sometimes focus more on customer acquisition and overlook the importance of customer retention. Hence, every business should leverage the power of Digital marketing to up customer retention rates.
In this article, we will learn what is customer retention and customer churn and discuss six different ways to use email marketing to boost customer retention rates.
Let’s start!
What is Customer Retention?
Customer retention refers to the actions that a company takes to retain their customers and generate repeat orders. When customers remain loyal to a business for the long term, then it improves the company profits. A high retention rate means more customer engagement and greater chances of conversion.
What is Customer Churn?
Customer churn refers to the loss of customers over a certain period. Customers leave a business due to several reasons such as:
- Attracting the wrong customers.
- Better quality or pricing of products from competitors.
- Recurrent product issues.
- Poor customer support.
If the churn rate is high, then you should take immediate measures to improve it.
Ways To Reduce Customer Churn Using Email Marketing
Here are the top ways to reduce customer churn and improve customer retention using email marketing:
1- Give subscribers a choice as to how often they want to hear from you
If you are sending too many emails to your customers, sending them offers, or informing them about every new product added to your catalog, then you are annoying your users. Most people don’t like receiving daily marketing emails. It often leads to one result – unsubscribing. To avoid losing them, let them choose how often they’d like to receive emails — daily, weekly roundups, or monthly digest. Selecting the best frequency for sending emails delivers the highest ROI.
2- Send appreciation emails
Customer appreciation emails are perfect for showing your gratitude. Sending regular thank you emails increases the customer lifetime value (CLV). You can send these emails to reward your most loyal customers when they make a purchase or respond to a survey/poll or request.
Use a friendly tone and say something positive in the subject line. You can show your appreciation with a special offer or reward your customers with a holiday ticket. Rewards or gifts should be something that your customers like the most.
3- Follow up after closing a customer service ticket
Listening to the customer and fixing the issues promptly is significant to keep the customer happy. After the support executives resolve the ticket, you can send a quick follow-up email to determine if the service was satisfactory and their problem was resolved. Follow up emails are required to make sure your customers are satisfied with your product or service. A happy customer remains loyal to the company.
4- Share helpful and engaging content
Email marketing is not just for sending promotional emails. If you want your customers to take action, then send them what they need. Data-driven email messages personalized to the customer’s needs can bring a drastic change in your email marketing strategy. Send compelling content such as blog posts, reports, statistics, or case studies that provide useful or interesting information.
5- Personalize your emails
Analyze and segment customers to build campaigns that deliver personalized messages or products to each customer group. People like to be seen as individuals, and personalized emails are more likely to be opened. Email segmentation fetches 50% more CTR as compared to non-personalized emails.
You need to have data to send personalized emails. For instance, you can use the customer’s first name, share the products that they have in their cart, share the products they last brought, or other data. A personalized email should be relevant, timely, and should come from a person and not bots. People hate receiving messages from accounts such as no reply. You can use an email signature having a picture of a person like your support manager or the CEO to have a maximum impact.
6- Re-engagement campaigns
Re-engagement email campaigns target inactive or disengaged customers to try to reignite interest in your brand. They play a crucial role in the entire email marketing lifecycle.
For instance, you can share the improvements you have made in your products or services or send a ‘surprise me’ box that invites the users to take actions. Using gamification and creativity in your emails offers new opportunities for re-engagement and reduces customer churn.
Final Thoughts
If the customers are unhappy, they will stop doing business with you. Therefore, take the above steps to build relationships with your users and prevent customer churn. Email marketing offers a budget-friendly tactic to grow your business by keeping your customers happy and loyal. Remember, your competitors are already using strategies to retain customers and acquire more. Upgrade your marketing strategy to add more customers to your business without ignoring your current users. Happy customer retention!
