Email Marketing for Customer Retention
Gathering Email addresses (with permission), with the aim of incorporating email marketing for customer retention into your overall marketing strategy is a great activity and one worthy of special attention.
You can do this with online list building services like Sumo Me, or paper versions of the same thing stuck on your counter top beside your till. You can do this through Facebook contests or by having people put their email address in a goldfish bowl to enter an in-store competition. You can do this at trade and consumer shows, at networking events and as part and parcel of your ongoing interaction and communication with your existing customers. Stick an invite to join your mailing list in your auto-signature.
When a person gives you their email address in the full knowledge that you will market to them, there is a clear indication that they are happy for this to happen. There is a commitment; a sign that they think you are ok.
Now, don’t forget that, like all other elements of your varied pro-active communication with your audiences, whatever you write about in your email marketing must be of interest to your customers and prospects and provide them with opportunities to gain value. There’s little point in constructing a lovely email about stuff they simply aren’t interested in. Vary the content of your emails and keep track of their success. Learn to know what works and what not so much. Come up with different articles for your different audiences.
Sure, it can be contended that the success rate of email marketing might be low, in terms of click-throughs to your website and purchases (where relevant). But it can equally be argued that the investment is pretty low too. Especially if you’re disciplined enough to be noting down what it is you want to say in your next email as you go about your daily tasks. Where this form of marketing can indeed be slow and time-consuming is if you find yourself sitting down to write your next email without having put any thought into it previously. That’s a sure-fire way of wasting time staring at a computer screen or looking up videos of cuddly cats on YouTube. DO NOT click on that link!
Jot down your ideas as you go. Have a focal point for each email. That might be the pure selling of one particular product or other this month, or simply providing useful non-salesy information for your customers next time. Think about what your customers want and remember that this is, at a minimum, brand reinforcement you are engaging in.
Email Marketing for Customer Retention – Tools
There are several well-known email marketing platforms that dominate this market. I use Mailchimp, which is free for those who have fewer than 2,000 email addresses on their list. Automation services (for example, where you want to automatically send an email to a person who has read a certain blogpost on your website) incur a cost.
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