A customer journey doesn’t stop at the end of a purchase. This step is followed by an equally, if not more important phase called customer loyalty. You can improve this by implementing good services, personal communication, creating a community or through personalised email marketing. There are, of course, a lot of other different ways to increase your customer loyalty. Today we’re going to learn more about the last one: email marketing.
Email marketing can be used to target both existing and potential customers.
- Existing customers: obtain clients’ opinions by sending follow-up emails and stimulate cross-selling by recommending related products.
- Potential customers: convince them by showing more relevant items from the same category or discounts on the products they were looking at.
Let’s see how you can use these emails to improve your sales and loyalty.
Acquire email addresses
The first thing you have to do is to obtain your customers’ email addresses. There are plenty of ways to do so, but pop-ups are by far the best method. Implementing the right pop-ups on different pages on your website will trigger customers to leave their personal information.
The exit intent pop-up is one of the most effective ways to push clients towards a certain conversion, in this case leaving their email addresses. This type of pop-up gets triggered when someone is about to leave your website. A message like: “Subscribe to our newsletter and receive a 10% discount on your next purchase..” is far more powerful than: “Leave your email address here to get an update about new collections.”. You can find more information about other useful implementations in our blog about pop-ups.
This method is great for both buyers and potential buyers. Another way to obtain email addresses is by simplifying your checkout process. This step often puts potential buyers off and that’s such a shame because you can improve this very easily. By guiding your client through a couple of easy steps, you are more likely to complete an order and obtain relevant information, in this case email addresses, to retarget these people. Checkout optimisation is very important for e-commerce businesses.
Learn by doing nothing
The second step in improving customer loyalty and sales through email marketing is to learn everything about your clients. Again, there are a couple of methods to do so.
The old and wrong way to discover someone's interests is through long, boring forms. No one has the time or is in the mood to fill in these everlasting lists, resulting in a loss of clientele. Fortunately, technology can be deployed here to get to know your potential shoppers.
By using Artificial Intelligence software, you can easily learn everything there is to know in only a matter of time. When visitors accept your cookies and terms, they allow you to analyse their search history and other relevant data on your website only. This information is worth gold and your customer doesn’t have to do anything at all to provide it. It’s a win-win situation. The next step is to link relevant recommendations to the right people.
Show them what you got
The last phase is to provide your existing and potential customers with the right content. When you do so, please keep in mind that it’s very important to stay relevant. Sending ‘Thank you for your purchase.” messages to people who didn’t buy anything is something you really want to avoid if you want to build healthy relationships.
There are a lot of subjects you can write about, but the first thing you have to consider is whether you are writing to existing customers or to potential ones.
Your first message to existing customers should be a follow-up email. This message has to be sent 1 or 2 days after their purchase. In this mail, you can thank them for choosing your company, ask them about possible problems or to review the product, show them tutorials, etc. This shows that you care about your client and it will increase loyalty.
A couple of days or weeks later, another email should be sent. This time you can recommend relevant products by showing items that can be used with the one the customer already ordered, or similar products with other features. When done correctly, you can turn your clientele into returning customers, improving their loyalty.
Potential customers demand a different approach. Follow-up emails can’t be used yet, because they didn’t buy anything. You have to make sure they purchase something first. This can be done by asking them to complete their order or by showing similar products they already looked up. This email is crucial because you don’t have a lot of chances to trigger these people. You have to make sure you trigger them to re-visit your website and to buy something.
To keep in mind
Improving customer loyalty can be done in many different ways and email marketing is a great method to start with. Pop-ups and AI will do the hard work for you to make sure your customers receive the right content at the right time.