The advent of Internet has paved way for many marketing strategies, but still email stand out as one of the most effective types of marketing. According to campaign monitor, “89% of the marketers consider that their email marketing strategy is a success.”& report by Chief Marketer shows “email marketing outperforms other marketing tactics when it comes to lead generation.”
Thumb rule for any marketing strategy is never get stagnant, as it is dynamic & ever changing. We need to stay connected with trends & technology. In fact, 59% of B2B marketers believe email marketing is considered as one of the main revenue generating sources.
Have you ever wondered why email is the main source of revenue generating models for most the companies? This is because it is personal, targeted & mean to be consistent. You may have a question, email is old school, but a report from HubSpot says it helps in improving sales & margins.Hence email marketing can be used to increase engagement & deepening of customer connection.
If you close a huge deal for your product& improve sales of your company then it is cloud nine moment right!! Apart from trust you’ve established with customer & improved revenue, wondering what else can make sure maintaining effective customer relationship? Here we discuss about numerous strategies that can be used to retain customers. Though there are many such strategies we’ll be discussing about the most important aspect of retaining customer via email marketing.
What is Customer Retention?
A company’s ability to retain its customer over time is often referred as customer retention. Ideally, it is percentage based metric which can give count of customers retained at the end of a given time period. This time period is varying from company to company & service they offer.
Customer retention is impacted by a number of new customers acquired, and number of existing customer churn by cancelling their subscriptions or business contract.
How Customer Retention Is Calculated?
Gone are the days when company or sales person thought having one common channel to target your audience is important. But now the scenario has been changed and especially with the panademic everything is new normal. As the report by Oberla there are 3.5 billion social media users & on average users spend 3 hours per day on social media.
{(Customers at the end of a period-Customers Acquired during period)/Customers at start period)]*100}
Why Customer Retention is important?
Now you would have aware customer retention, how a company can be successful in acquiring new customers & how successful they are at satisfying existing customers.
A report by HubSpot shows 5% increase in the customer retention improves revenue by 25- 90%. Customer retention brings the company a ton of ROI.
Here are few critical reasons why customer retention is important to company’s growth.
- Affordability
- ROI
- Loyalty
- Referrals
- Reduces promotional expenses
- Improves Brand image
- Improves Revenue
- Improved employee Satisfaction
- Better Customer Experience
Audit Your Automated Emails:
Take a look of tone of your automated messaging sent to customers. As a B2B marketer, it is important to make sure new & existing customers matches with the tone of the current times which helps to connect with customers. Always evaluate the current customer journey & outgoing campaign to provide extra support & thoughtful touch via email. Hope you have heard about customer first examples of email which could nurture your relationship with customers.
Thank you & Appreciation Emails:
In the internet era, our inboxes are cluttered with tones of emails. A well-timed executed thank you note can create a huge impact on customers. Along with the thank you note you can share the highlight of support offered by business, deals & discounts.
Simple & elegance note can do wonders when it comes to customer retention. And more importantly, today’s audience is highly connected with a visual oriented messaging platform such as Instagram, YouTube, Snap chat & more. Try new formats & keep the standard high, to make sure content is engaging & connect with customers in real time.
Produce Good Quality Content & be a voice:
Quality of content should never be compromised. Developing engaging & high quality content can be brand voice. Being brand voice pushes you to produce a significant portion of engaging & high quality content. Here you must act a thought provoking leader from everything you say starting from subject line. This is slow &a steady process by building consistency through voice which makes you recognizable & memorable. Alternatively polish content builds unique brand for your voice.
Adhere to the practice of sending personalized messages:
Everyone loved to be special right? Same goes for your customers too. Make them special by addressing their needs through emails.
Collaborate with Data Marketers Group for discovering everything you need to know about customer retention, what it is, how it can be used, how it can be measured, why it is important & organization must be spend ample amount of marketing budget for improving revenue.
Personalization helps B2B marketers in sending messages based on their priority & engagement ratio. Email personalization gives a wonderful feel of receiving messages from the brand you trust & love. And if you want to build a high level of trust personalization is key.
How Email Personalization Can Be Achieved?
There are many ways to roll out personalized campaign here are few tips:
Smart Subject Line:
Most common & best practice is to use email subject lines to address contacts by their name & other well-known factor. This idea can be leveraged to create smart subject lines for your marketing emails.Grab your client’s attention right away & entice to open your mail with a strong subject line.
For instance, if you’re sending an email promoting an upcoming webinar, you must two different list with customer, one who attended your past webinars & list of new customers who are yet to attend a webinar.
Include Smart CTA:
Another popular way is to add content to your email by including smart CTA. Smart Call To Action can be tailored to contacts from different lifecycle stages, countries, list, preferred languages & much more. Smart CTA’s helps your leads to progress further in their buyer’s journey with contextual offers.
Smart Text:
Finally an email is incomplete without short & crisp mail body. Research & build smart rules to target customers based on memberships & sales lifecycle. With the help of smart content, there are endless opportunities to connect with contacts based on their targeted group & provide contextual experience.
Benefits of personalized Email:
- Helps you to understand highly targeted contacts
- Improves sales
- Improves engagement ratio
- Strengthen customer experience
- Build Trust
Keep them coming back for more:
The well-known fact is that the success rate of selling a product to a customer you already won is 60-70%. So wondering how to do this? No worries!! You need to retain, upsell & cross sell your customer to get customer lifetime value. If a customer has good relationship & buys from you, remember they have a good relationship with your brand.
Friendly Reminder:
Based on the customer geographic location a friendly email must be sent whenever there is a major marketing event going on. This type of email builds trust between you & customers, allowing them to take necessary actions if required.Reminders can be targeted or niche focusing a group of customers.
Market Research Survey, Feedback & Contest:
This method is one the most valuable input to gain insight about customer. Remember a simple survey would fetch you incredible results. Combining completed survey with a chance to win the contest will drive more responses.Collected feedbacks can be used to get information about existing customer on how their expectation & how they feel about your brand. Whenever a customer purchases your product request them for a simple feedback about services provided.
Advocacy Program:
Whenever a new customer comes on board, it is great to introduce them to your advocacy program with some fabulous rewards & providing new exposure to prospects. Send an email inviting new customers to program & explain how it works. This email must be a key note on explaining offers, rewards & been valued customers. And most importantly, every advocacy program must come with an expiry date so that you can keep your brand in the minds of the highly valued customers.
Conclusion:
Email Marketing is clearly one of the best marketing channels worth investing in. But the key takeaway is ensuring customer retention is doesn’t stop with high email open rate & click through ratio. From nurturing long term relationship building customer journey email is the primary component for any buyer’s journey.If you’re looking to collaborate with agencies for building customer retention strategies, we’re happy to help you. Being pioneers in building better customer retention programs, Data Marketers Group focus on relevancy &has good experience in handling clients from different industry.