The success of an email marketing campaign for retention relies on more than just the content. With over 144 billion emails sent a day, how can you ensure that your message doesn’t get lost in the shuffle?
While there is something true in the old cliche “content is king,” strategy is necessary to engage your customers and keep them continuously interested in opening your messages. With smoove’s features, you can create robust campaigns, test variables, implement templates, create custom content, easily measure success, and automate your distribution.
Let’s take a look at some best practices for email marketing and how smoove can help you achieve your retention strategy needs.
Step One: List Management
Communication is based on senders and receivers, and it only makes sense to send emails to the right customers. For example, you wouldn’t want to send a loyal customer a win-back email if they’re currently making purchases. Yet still, list management goes beyond segmentation, targeting and personalization.
Customers work through sales funnels and the goal is to keep them moving up and staying active. User actions should dictate the kind of messages they receive to drive this process along without much leg work on your end. With smoove, you can use smart links to set up triggers that automatically segment your audience and add contacts to your lists based on the actions they take within your emails, SMS messages and even on landing pages from your website.
To exemplify, say you send an email with a countdown clock and a promotional offer to customers who have lapsed in the past month. You’re giving them 24 hours to act and redeem the discount. Once they click on the call-to-action button that says “redeem offer,” you want to send a reminder email if they have not yet made a purchase when there is only four hours left. By using smoove’s smart link, you can automate a follow-up email to be sent with a final reminder for those who have yet to visit the checkout page. In this way, you can create personalized emails without having to continuously check on your lists. The system does the work for you.
Furthermore, when you create lists, you can allow for them to be “public,” so that your customers can actually see the lists they are subscribed to in your system. In the event they are tired of receiving one kind of email from a specific list, they can solely unsubscribe from it rather than globally unsubscribing. This is a very important retention tactic as once a person unsubscribes, you can no longer contact them. But, in this way, you can still direct the messages that they are okay receiving and keep them as a contact record.
Deeper Dive: Segment Based on Status
“Don’t forget to think about the physical as well as the mental state of your client when they read your email.” – Jeanne Jennings, Founder and Lead Strategist at Email Optimization Shop, Consultant, Trainer, Speaker and Published Author.
Messaging your customers differently based on their engagement with your email communication is a good starting point. But, another useful way to target your customers is to break them up based on their spending habits and purchase history. Loyal customers appreciate rewards.
Whether you already have a loyalty program set-up or not, email marketing can help you let your VIP customers know they are valued. Smoove allows for you to segment your lists based on the amount of money they’ve spent or how recently they made a purchase. The automatic list generation of your most valuable customers means that you can minimize your spending on loyalty programs, and use that budget to instead offer promotions and thank you gifts to these customers.
These little personal touches go a long way in showing a customer that they are important to your business, and of course, when they receive special and personalized discounts, they are more likely to purchase again.
Step Two: Create a Campaign
You have your intended audience ready to go, and now it’s time for the content to work its magic. Whether you have a team of designers at your disposal or not, smoove makes it easy to create beautiful emails at your fingertips. Throughout the entire process, pop-up boxes will lead you to the next step should you need assistance, but even without the added help, the user-friendly experience directs you through the process. Simply begin by defining who you’re sending the email to and continue with the selection of one of the many pre-designed templates, or take the time to create your own custom content.
You have options for how you can create your campaign- whether you want to use the email templates, text editor, an external URL, or a ZIP file, each option is always available.
Step Three: Personalization and Content Options
Every retention manager knows the value of personalization when it comes to treating your customers right. Smoove’s advanced and automated text fields allow for the database to do the work in making your content feel personal. When you set up a campaign, you can choose from a drop-down menu of options for what field to personalize in the message.
Even when choosing a pre-made template, you can edit the content blocks and add personalized touches, like a customized offer for only a segment of your list.
Step Four: A/B Testing and Analytics
Optimization is always the goal in running successful marketing campaigns. But, you don’t know what works best until you try. With smoove’s A/B testing, you can efficiently try two different options for subject lines, content blocks, promotions and more and send to a sample size of your list. Based on performance, the winning content will be sent to the remainder of your list automatically. Conversion rates can be set up as open rates or click-through rates, depending on your goal.
You can also take your analytics a step further by using the Advanced tab and incorporating specific links to be tracked with the Google Analytics integration.
Step Five: Automation
Customers expect more from businesses than ever before. In some instances, customer experience trumps pricing and product quality in an increasingly experiential marketplace.
Marketing automation is a key in retaining customers and decreasing churn because it allows for the customer experience to be seamless and logical. Since so much of the customer experience is digital and about 60% of a sales journey happens before a sales lead is even in contact with a customer, being able to track a customer’s path is pertinent to retaining their business.
Smoove has multiple ways to help you capture your leads, from creating landing pages to using smart forms to increasingly request more information from engaged customers. But, what about after they’ve made a purchase? You can set up auto-response email marketing so that the time between an action a user takes and a follow-up email is within seconds. The sooner you are able to reach out, the less time a customer has to look at your competition.
Another idea is to adopt an approach that Amazon does so well. Rather than only cross-selling and up-selling to your customers who have recently purchased, you can send an automatic email after a purchase that asks them to write a product review. Then, once they review the product, you can automate another email that then includes other products they may like based on their review. That way, you’re creating a two way relationship that isn’t only about the buying relationship, and also gain more customer insight so that you can provide solutions to maximize their satisfaction and experience.
There’s automation when it comes to actual messages, and then there’s also automation when it comes to reminders of what you should do next. With the mini CRM module in smoove’s system, you can create smart/automatic reminders of next steps to take on a lead or customer so that you never miss a beat in the sales cycle.
Wrap – Up
Email marketing is a key tactic for customer retention. While there is a lot of strategy that goes into creating the perfect content for the right audience, there are many ways that smoove’s automated tools make the entire experience seamless and easily trackable. From customizable templates designed for various industries and topics to the list management and automated CRM features, smoove allows for your email marketing campaigns to be robust and measurable.
From the start of a customer relationship, or capturing leads, to maintaining a buying relationship with your current customers, email marketing keeps your message front and center and is a powerful tool in gauging customer satisfaction, which is the number one aspect of retaining loyal customers.
Starting from step one or elevating your strategies, how can you let smoove help you today?
Reach out and let us know what you need. We’re here to help!
