Email Marketing: 1 Easy way to Increase Sales

While starting a business today is much easier than before, running a successful business has proven to be a quite challenging task. There is strong competition in every market and business owners are constantly looking for a way to increase revenue and expand their business operations with email marketing. One of the things that must be included in your general business strategy is customer retention. Customer retention is defined in different ways, but the simplest description is that customer retention represents the number of customer relationships that a business can keep in the long run once there are established.

This is a very important factor in the growth of any business. Many different customer retention strategies are available to business owners today, few are the ones that actually follow. These strategies can significantly boost your customer retention rates if they are used in a proper way.  One customer retention strategy that is used by several businesses today is email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is described as a special type of marketing that is conducted with the help of electronic mail. So, every email sent to a prospective of the current customer is considered to be an email marketing activity. In the case of customer retention, these emails are sent to existing customers. Email marketing designed for customer retention is different than the typical promotional emails we’ve all seen. They are here to entertain, inform, educate and ultimately help business owners create a long-term relationship with their clients. They are more than a sales talk – they contain substantial content.

Reasons to create a relationship with customers via email

Educational – These emails can help customers the industry knowledge that will help them connect your products and services with quality. In other words, they will find out why they should buy your items.

Informational – People must stay informed about your latest product announcements, content and other new things about our business. So, this is another reason why you should use email to create a relationship with customers. This is the simplest way to share these updates.

Brand awareness – Many businesses use newsletter emails for this purpose. Namely, they have figured out that newsletter emails can improve brand awareness and establish a stronger relationship with their loyal customers.

Advisory – It’s not unusual to send advisory emails, so there’s another reason why you should use email marketing for customer retention. Customers will definitely become more loyal when they get information about how to use the products they’ve bought in the best way.

Reorder reminder – Finally, you can also use emails to remind your existing customers that they need to reorder a specific product. For example, these emails are sent to online customers that are buying contact lenses, pet supplies, printer cartridges and other similar things online.

Of course, the list of reasons is much longer, but we have focused on the most important reasons.

How to grow customer retention rate via email marketing

Customer retention rate can be significantly increased with the help of email messages. For starters, you can use emails to deliver personalised messages to certain categories of customers. If you use special email marketing software for this purpose, you can divide your existing customers into different meaningful clusters and create email messages tailored to their needs. This is especially useful to you if you offer different kinds of products and services. More relevant emails will help you grow customer retention rate and vice versa.

As previously mentioned, you can also use emails to improve customer retention with friendly reminder emails. You can remind them about certain events or maybe about their products that are about to get empty or used. For example, if you are selling dog food and a customer has order one package for a small breed dog that lasts for one month, you can send a reminder after three weeks.

Another great option is to use email to deliver promotions and coupons to customers. According to some surveys, over 50% of millennials said that promotional emails have affected their purchasing decision. (1) Keep in mind that these promotions don’t have to be spectacular. Only a small discount or a free product in addition to the order can make them satisfied and turn a first-time buyer into a repeat customer.

Finally, you can use emails to receive customer review or feedback requests. People love it when they have a chance to voice their opinion and you can definitely profit from this by improving their services and products. The final result is clear – increased customer retention rate.

Advantages of email marketing

First of all, email marketing is an effective type of marketing. It doesn’t take much time for you to create attractive emails. According to some statistics, it should not take more than 12 minutes to write an email of this kind. (3)

Next, some surveys show that it takes about 5-7 messages to get your customer to make another purchase. (2) We should also mention another great advantage of email marketing and that’s the opportunity to create viral emails. If the content is attractive, it is very likely that the receiver will forward it to their friends and colleagues. In other words, you can expect free advertisement. In the end, we must point out that email marketing is not constrained with any time frames. Your email marketing campaign can include automated sending of emails at specific days and specific periods of the day.

Emailing tips and hints

One of the best ways to enhance your email marketing campaign results is to use A/B/ testing. This testing allows users to send one form of their campaign to specific users and other to another group of users in order to measure the effects. Obviously, the one with a better response should be used in the future. The email results data you get will allow you to learn more about opens and clicks rate and you should adjust emails and subject based on this data. The perfect solution is to use a software that has the ability to record these opens and clicks of every customer, filter spam content, send informational emails, speed up the designing and creation of these emails, help you personalise emails and more.

We hope that this article will help you understand the importance of email marketing for customer retention. In addition, a good read would be 8 Tips to Prepare a Killer Email Marketing Campaign.

• https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Promotions-Influence-Millennials-Purchase-Decisions/1014416
• https://www.tutorialspoint.com/management_concepts/the_rule_of_seven.htm
• http://allimtutorials.com/matt-furey-the-furey-formula-for-making-a-fortune-with-email/