Different examples of branded engagement emails. (via reallygoodemails.com)

There are various ways to keep your customer engaged in your product or service, even after the initial purchase. Recommendations based on previous shopping, triggered Emails based on usage of your product or service, or through notifications related to your loyalty program.

Loyalty/reward notifications

Loyalty emails show customer appreciation based on your customer’s interaction with your product or service. You can send out offers or specific triggered emails based their previous purchases and points earned.

• Initial messages - these messages let customers know to complete their profile and preferences that allow you to better cater to their interests.
• Nearly reaching a level or number of points - lets customer know they are a number of points, purchases, or dollars away from reaching a certain level or earning a milestone of points in the program and highlights the benefits they’ll receive.
• Reaching a milestone - congratulates customer on getting to a certain level of your program or earning a milestone of points and goes over the added benefits they now have access to.
• Points or reward expiring - lets customer know that their points will expire soon and encourages them to use them towards their rewards.
• Loyalty program reengagement - triggered by a lack of loyalty program usage, encouraging customer to get additional points by continuing their usage.

Discovery/recommendations

If you have a range of content, products, or services, you can send out emails that allow for your customers to discover new options for them.

• General recommendations - based on aggregate data of your customers.
• Curated options - a collection of themed options. Holidays are an example of a good opportunity for these.
• Personalized recommendations - based on the customer’s previous purchases. These usually perform the best.

Triggered

If you have a product or service that involves interaction from your customers, you can setup triggered emails to encourage further engagement.

• Progression - customer doesn’t finish filling out their profile details or setting up required preferences to use your product or service.
• Action taken - customer performs a certain action that would benefit from an email reminder at a later time. Like bookmarking a product, or registering for an event.
• Usage reengagement - lack of app sessions or service usage, encouraging user to open the app with incentives, or by giving them usage tips, or highlighting new features.

Another type of Engagement Email worth considering are anniversaries of when your user signed up, a birthday email, or other special occasions that may be relevant to your product or service. A recent trend has also been year-in-review emails sent out towards the end of the year that highlight your customer’s usage of your product or service in a fun way.

Ready to put together your engagement email? Download our free engagement email template to use for designing and building your emails. And check out other email types and components you can use for your email design.