Top 5 Components of Email Marketing to Improve Customer Retention
Customer retention refers to the ability of a company to retain its customers over a particular period. If your organization has customers coming back to you for more and increasing their purchases over time, it means you have a high customer retention rate.
Why is customer retention important?
In one of our blog posts, we spoke about how acquiring a new customer is 10 times more costly than retaining an old one. It is also essential for gaining feedback on your products and services.
Customer retention is crucial for your organization’s sustainable growth. Email marketing has proven to be a powerful tool to improve customer retention. It is cost effective and gives higher ROI than other channels.
Listed below some of the basics points that you should keep in mind before starting with email marketing:
- Ask the users for consent, let them decide to sign up to your email list,
- Segment and target the messaging to your users,
- Use a warm up or a ramp up plan for your email communications initially,
- Do not spam the users with too many communications,
- Set goals,
- Have Calls to Action in place to measure conversions against goals, and also track the best time to trigger emails,
- Keep an option for them to opt out or unsubscribe from your mailing list,
- Check responsiveness for your templates on mobile devices.
What does email marketing include?
The basic components of email marketing for your online store are listed below:
1. Popups to grow your subscriber base
The first in the five-part series of email marketing aimed at accomplishing customer retention is setting up a popup on your website. The popup can be used to collect the email addresses and phone numbers of your customers. This allows you to follow up with them after their purchase as well, build customer relationships, educate them about your mission and products, and inform them about new product launches. You can also use pop-ups to collect more data about your customers and personalize your marketing emails accordingly. For example, an online store selling skin products may want to ask its visitors questions about their skin type so as to be able to suggest an appropriate selection of products to them.
2. Welcome Series
Extend a warm welcome to your customers through a series curated specifically for you and your customers. Once your customers sign up to receive the marketing emails, they should receive an introduction to your organization and your products. It is as simple as that! This is the first step is letting your customers know what you believe in and what your products stand for. It is a great place to show how you are different from your competitors and why your customers should prefer your products. Would you like your customers to know about your social media channels, new launches and best sellers? A welcome series will do all of that for you at the click of a button. Imagine how much time this will save you. You will be able to focus on your business even more.
3. Abandoned Cart Series
What happens when a potential customer places items in their cart, but never checks out? They abandon their cart and you lose a sale. It is understandable why a customer may choose to not go through with their purchase. This is why you must consider an abandoned cart series of emails to market your products to these customers in particular. A set of personalized emails reaching out to the customer based on the customer’s cart value, behavior, lifetime value and life cycle should be constructed for your business. When a potential customer abandons their cart, emails that are to be sent over a period of time are automatically triggered.
These emails, coupled with discounts to nudge recipients into completing their purchase, can be extremely effective in moving the customers further in the marketing funnel.
4. Browse Abandoned Series
This absolutely brilliant series helps you keep track of all of the products that were looked at by customers but not purchased. It will give you insights on which products are popular, a sure sell or a “maybe” amongst your consumers. An important aspect of this email series is to pick the “right” product that your customer was most interested in and send more information about that product in your emails. You may add more to these emails such as social proof related to that product and other related items.
These people are already interested in your product or service, all they need is a final push or a hook, to make the purchase.
5. Cross-Sell Series
Cross-sell is a powerful email series for several reasons. When a customer buys from your store, they already trust you. Their purchase intent is high at that point. This is a great time to suggest products complementary to their original purchase. So, if there is a pair of earrings you are looking to sell to someone because they purchased a dress matching the earrings, a cross-sell series will send out emails to them letting them know about these earrings being sold at your store. This series is the perfect option for you if you want to recommend other products to your customers. It will not only educate consumers about the range of products that you offer but will also increase your average revenue per customer, thereby increasing your sales.
There are two ways you can craft your personalized cross-sell emails:
The first way is to manually select complementary products to recommend to a customer after they buy a certain product. There are several issues with this approach such as being more intuition-based than the actual purchase data, and it quickly becomes impossible to manage as the number of SKUs in your store increases.
The second is to allow ShopAgain to do it for you. The powerful AI systems of ShopAgain automatically create cross-sell recommendations hyper-personalized for your store and your customers. This means you can claim and launch your own cross-sell series within a few clicks.
So, does email marketing work? The answer is yes, it does. Email marketing is one of the most effective methods to retain customers. ShopAgain provides an AI-backed email marketing system that helps you generate higher sales by aiding in customer retention across Shopify. Pay a lot of attention to email subject lines, do A/B testing with different subject lines and record responses in the form of click rates, conversions, open rates and other defined metrics. Make sure that your email domain reputation is high so that the emails do not end up in the spam folder of the recipients.
Join us now to improve your retention on autopilot!