How Email Marketing Builds Customer Loyalty

Email marketing, although it's changed significantly over the past decade, has consistently helped businesses drive repeat purchases from customers since it was first introduced. It's certainly a traditional marketing strategy that has stood the test of time. Although email marketing can be highly effective in improving customer retention, it’s easy to get wrong - just like any other marketing technique. So if it’s proven to work, why do businesses still neglect it?

Email marketing is the most effective when targeted to existing customers. Of course, it can be used with customers who have just discovered your business and signed up to download a free guide, for example, but email marketing to these customers - in the early stages of their buying journey - can be less effective than targeting existing customers. For this reason, many marketing teams don’t make email marketing a priority, and they focus on strategies aimed at generating new customers instead. This is precisely where businesses are going wrong.

It’s widely understood that reselling or upselling your services to existing customers has a probability of being successful, somewhere between 60% and 70%. The probability of successfully acquiring a sale or enquiry from a brand new customer is around 5% to 20%. This notable difference is why businesses should put as much time and money into nurturing the customers they already have as they do into acquiring new audiences. In this article, we will discuss how to build customer loyalty with email marketing.

Segment Your Audience

Strategic audience segmentation is essential to successful email marketing for both established and small businesses. It involves organising your contacts list or central management system (CMS) based on their interests, previous purchases and engagement with your website or past email campaigns. This ensures that businesses can create campaigns specific to each audience group, personalising the content to suit their interest or engagement levels. If customers receive an email that feels generic or that isn’t personally valuable to them, they’re more likely to look past it.

The focus and content that’s included in these personalised emails will look entirely different from business to business. For example, a photo printing company such as Snapfish may use email marketing to offer discounts to audiences who have displayed an interest in a certain product like poster prints. Contrastingly, if we look at SEO powerhouse Semrush, they might separate their audiences based on product usage. Their marketing team could target users who regularly use their keyword magic tool, and include advanced tips on uncovering low-competition opportunities in the email’s content.

Set Up Post-Purchase Sequences

The moments immediately after a customer makes a purchase are often the most crucial in capturing their attention. Even in the days and weeks that follow, using email marketing to stay front of mind can be hugely influential in whether they choose to use your business again. After a customer makes a purchase, setting up a sequence of emails that are valuable or educational can encourage them to trust your expertise and skillset, and thus want to use your services again. 

In B2C organisations, it’s common to keep existing customers up to date with the latest deals you have on offer or new products that are due to be launched. B2B organisations instead share information about the latest projects they’ve worked on, team news or industry insights that demonstrate their knowledge. Sequences set up for customers who make a purchase mustn’t be solely focused on promoting further products or services. Businesses that see the most success with email marketing combine a mixture of promotional and insightful content so that audiences don't feel overwhelmed by promotional content. Post-purchase sequences that are personalised to each customer, based on their purchasing history, have higher open rates than those that are untargeted.

Ask for Feedback

Customer loyalty is achieved through trust, and the best way to get customers to trust your business is to show them that their feedback is important. It's common for businesses to set up feedback emails a few days after purchase or once a project is fully complete, but it's also recommended to ask for feedback after any event or interaction a customer makes with your business. Feedback emails should be clear, concise and easy to respond to. If it takes more than a couple of minutes to fill out a star rating to complete a form, customers will get bored and move along. Asking for feedback in the form of emails is considered more effective than asking customers directly. While some customers may choose to ignore these emails, many are more comfortable leaving detailed and honest feedback through a digital review than they would be in person or over the phone.

Reward Loyalty

Email marketing is a great way to reward customers who have demonstrated loyalty to your business. They can be made highly personalised, which encourages the customer to feel unique and appreciated by your business and its team. Offering incentives and rewards also encourages customers to make future purchases, especially in cases where businesses set up a tiered reward system so customers have something to look forward to if they keep using your products or services. 

It’s not always easy for businesses to offer grand discounts and freebies, particularly in early startups or teams with strict marketing budgets. Businesses need to understand that incentives can come in many different shapes and sizes, and there are a number of ways businesses can offer attractive rewards without spending a fortune. For example, if you're a local business, consider collaborating with other businesses in your area to promote each other's services and increase brand awareness for both parties. 

Many brands reward customer loyalty in several different ways, but more often than not, they tailor the incentives they offer to the actual audiences that are browsing and purchasing their products. One way this has been successfully executed is in REFY Beauty’s ‘REFY World’ Incentive scheme. Instead of rewarding customers for spending more money, REFY cleverly offers loyalty rewards to customers based on how often they shop. This incentive is particularly effective for REFY’s audience, as it encourages frequent repeat purchases both online and in-store, aligning naturally with the recurring purchasing habits associated with beauty products.

Keep Emails Concise and Mobile Responsive

Every business understands how important it is to get the design of your email campaigns right. Although the content is crucial to converting customers, professional and attractive design is necessary to capture their attention. Every email, whether part of a recapture or nurturing campaign, should be immediately identifiable to your brand. Ensure every element from colour schemes to typography is consistent, and the copy and offerings are tailored to each customer.

Today, especially across younger generations, emails are checked and responded to via mobile devices, compared to laptops and PCs in previous years. This significant change in consumer behaviour has meant that businesses must make their email marketing campaign mobile-friendly. Not only will the email's content be unclear and confusing if it's not adjusted for mobile use, but it will also indicate to customers that you’re unprofessional and out of touch.

To get started with email marketing, businesses need accurate and up-to-date email lists. Luckily, there are several helpful email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Cliqly, that organise large amounts of data and set up email automations to save you time. Mailchimp also offers advanced features where you can monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns and measure vital metrics such as click rate and bounce rate. 

If you’re a well-established business that has never used email marketing, it may be useful to cleanse your CMS data by sending a generic email to active contacts and filtering out emails that bounce back or unsubscribe. From there, you can segment your audience based on activity, ensuring your emails reach customers who are most likely to respond.