6 ways to use Email Marketing to improve customer relationships
Relationships are built over time and they take a lot of hard work to build. The same applies to businesses trying to build lasting relationships with their customers through email marketing. It is less expensive to secure repeat customers compared to securing new ones. Regardless, it still takes a lot of work to retain and attract customers.
If you would like to build better customer relations through email marketing, it would be a wise move to contact a digital marketing agency to fine-tune your marketing strategy. Consider these six ways to use email marketing to improve customer relationships.
1. Segment emails based on behavior
According to Marketing Sherpa, the most difficult challenge brands have with email marketing is creating content that is relevant to the target audience and that will fully engage them. Content is a very relevant part of any marketing strategy aimed at building a long-lasting relationship with customers. Knowing who you are talking to and what to say to them to get the desired action is essential to the success of any marketing effort.
Segmenting emails based on customer’s behavior on the brand’s website can help achieve that. Many software and tools can be used to extract useful information when creating content relevant to those who have either interacted with the brand’s website in the past, or those who still engage with the brand’s website. With this, brands can keep email content aligned to the behavior of each customer and tailor content relevant to them in order to build a sustainable relationship.
2. Make emails interactive enough
There are a lot of things competing with the attention of an average human being in this fast-paced era that we live in. Brands must bear this in mind every time an email campaign is being sent out. What could make a subscriber open the email? Is the subject line catchy enough to make them open it? When they eventually decide to open it, is the content engaging enough to make them read all through to the end? If they have questions or reservations is there a way they can easily reach the brand? Businesses need to make subscribers feel like they are not being bombarded with so much information that there is no room for them to express how they feel about the information sent to them.
3. Always ask for feedback
Communication is a two-way street. So when using the email marketing method, communication must be structured as a two-way street. This will enable the brand to form a more trusted and sustainable relationship. If a business sends fifty-two emails every year, at least two to three emails should be about requesting feedback.
Feedback should be about listening to what your subscribers have to say. This should not be an attempt to get reviews that businesses can plaster all over their website, social media or even in emails too. No! The focus here is to get an honest review of their services. It can also be an opportunity to ask subscribers to update their interest so that the business can send more relevant content to them. Communication is incomplete without feedback, and quite a lot of brands miss out on the opportunity to build lasting relationships by skipping this important communication step.
4. Reward for loyalty and letting others know
Sometime last year, a popular personal saving app, PiggyBank, rewarded all their loyal customers with a fun-filled full day event and they told everyone about it (through emails, social media and promoted ads) but those subscribed to their emails were the first to know about it. Rewards for loyalty is one quick way to win over your customers and build a lasting relationship with them. And you’re not just rewarding in secret but openly. This makes customers feel like the brands care about them and that they are not just all about draining their hard earned money to get them to buy something from them. This can increase their eagerness to be on the lookout out for emails from such businesses and possibly share such emails with their friends too.
5. Show the human side of the brand to gain trust
Trust is very critical to the success of any relationship, including that of brands and customers. And trust has to be earned. To earn trust, a business needs to take a human approach to a few of the emails that they send. It shouldn’t be all about sales, offers, briefs about the brand’s services and all other formal email marketing things that make their way to email content. Businesses should learn to show the “humans of the brand”. It could be as simple as telling a brief story about a staff who has contributed immensely to a certain aspect of the business and how it has helped the brand grow.
Another example could be the CEO of the business sending out a personalised message to say “hi” to every subscriber. Switching the sender address to that of the CEO’s would make it more real. It is just about having that human connection to show that subscribers are not just interacting with robots that send out these automated emails. The more familiar subscribers get with the people behind the brand, the more likely they will be to increase their knowledge and desire to associate more with the brand.
6. Let subscribers know they can engage the brand on social media
Social media is a huge part of the lives of many people – millennial in particular. It has grown to become more than just a social networking platform – it is now a space where people can get relevant information about people and brands. With this information, they make an informed decision whether or not they want to keep interacting with the brand.
Businesses should use social media to show the social side of the brand and not treat it is as just another place to dump information again. It helps to let email subscribers know that they can follow and check out the brand’s interesting updates and activities on social media. This doesn’t take their attention off reading emails from you, rather it gives them a reason to want to keep looking forward to such emails especially if they are impressed with the social media feed.