In the past few years, customer retention has come to attract quite a bit of attention. And while retention may not be as sexy as acquisition, the ROI is far more appealing. By the Harvard Business Review’s account, it costs between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one, making customer loyalty efforts an obvious investment.
To help you start a customer retention program that pays off, the loyalty experts at Annex Cloud and the email experts at Maropost have come together to show you why and how you need to use email marketing to start crafting your customer loyalty strategy.
Customer loyalty is an incredibly cost-effective way to generate revenue—and so is email. With an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent, email more than earns its keep in your marketing arsenal.
But ROI isn’t the only reason loyalty programs and email marketing work so well together. Education and engagement are central parts of any loyalty program, and email has made incredible advancements here. Fueled by in-depth data collection and analytics, email allows for advanced automation, segmentation, and ongoing personalization—to keep customers coming back for more.
But setting up a successful loyalty email strategy involves more than just knowing that email is a great choice for producing personalized experiences—you need to know what kinds of campaigns to send. If you do nothing else, these three series are a great place to start:
By incorporating these three types of emails into your efforts, your loyalty program is off to a great start.
A customer is more likely to stay loyal if you’re sending personalized messaging. In fact, 41% of consumers say they purchase more from retailers who use behavior-based personalization in emails. So, once you’ve got the basics covered, it’s time to leverage the extensive personalization capabilities available in many email marketing tools to connect with customers on a personal level.
To start, use segmentation to break your loyalty members into relevant groups—this could be by geography, gender, purchase patterns, stated preferences, level of loyalty, or any other custom segment—then create relevant messaging to reach each segment.
Loyalty programs can be especially powerful when addressing customers based on purchase history. You can even identify customer segments who used to purchase frequently but have recently dropped off and use loyalty incentives to earn their attention again.
But because personalization takes effort, you’ll need to automate this process as much as possible. Automate everything from behavioral triggers for abandoned cart emails, earned reward notifications, loyalty offers, to personalized product and content recommendations, and more—for scalable personalization.
Now that you know how to start an email-centric customer loyalty program, it’s time to face a hard truth: even the best loyalty program will fail if you can’t keep your members excited.
To up your email loyalty program even further, keep these tips in mind:
Now you’re ready to send, engage, and keep your customers coming back for more with your email loyalty program! If you have any questions about combining your email and loyalty strategy, contact us or schedule a demo today.
Maropost is a unifed Customer Engagement Platform designed to provide B2C companies with a single solution for all areas of business- from marketing automation, to commerce, service, referral, and clienteling. Creating a 360-degree customer view through complete data integration, Maropost enables companies to deliver personalized experiences at scale. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Maropost is trusted by brands like DigitalMarketer, New York Post, Mercedes-Benz, SHOP.com, and Yext. Learn more at https://www.maropost.com/.