How Email Marketing Can Nurture Leads & Increase Customer Retention

Noticed that clients fall through, or consumers forget you’re there? In over saturated industries, churn is common and maintaining customers is difficult. Short-term sales take priority, where long-term strategies should be securing your leads and building relationships.

Often email marketing is overlooked, but time and time again, cleverly crafted email campaigns work wonders throughout the consumer journey for helping customers down the funnel.

Automated Email Campaigns = Marketing Magic

Customer retention requires a level of care and personalisation that random, handwritten emails cannot provide. Customers want to feel special and remembered.

An email campaign automation is software sending pre-scheduled, automated emails to customers based on specific triggers, behaviours, or timely rules. It cuts out the manual process of sending emails (everyone’s favourite job) and allows businesses and brands to send relevant messages, bang on time.

So, rather than customers randomly stumbling across your brand again on social media, you can appear in their inbox, when it’s appropriate or already on their mind, such like abandoned cart cues, post-purchase follow ups, or seasonal product promotions.

Magic.

B2B: A Friendly Wave

B2C or B2B, automated emails are a form of popping your head above ground.

Exciting news, impressive case studies or imposing insights can remind a business that you’re there. LinkedIn often shows your posts 3 weeks later, or the grapevine operated too slowly when there’s juicy gossip to hear instead, but an automated email will keep your clients in the know.

Segment Your Audience!

It’s all well and good automating your emails, but without audience segmentation, campaigns can be impersonal and irrelevant. This can easily turn into a spam of messages rather than the cleverly crafted campaigns you intended. Annoyed customers and lost sales.

Paint a picture: sending an elderly man, who only once purchased a product circa Christmas 3 years ago weekly brand updates and product launches. To us, it looks more like harassment than nurture. A youngster who follows every social account and orders twice a week would happily read the brand lingo and take note on new products.

See the importance?

Segmenting your audience will be the difference between the block and buy.

How can you segment your email?

·       Geographic: location, position

·       Demographic: age, gender, income, education, occupation, industry

·       Psychographic: beliefs, values, interests, lifestyle

How to Funnel: Touchpoints in Consumer Journey

Make way for the marketing funnel.

Awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy.

Throughout the consumer journey, there are strategic, key touchpoints where email marketing can come in to help push the consumer through the funnel, increasing customer retention and moving to build those long-term relationships.

Consideration:

The first key touchpoint, where consumers are evaluating their options and researching brands. Automated email campaigns can remind the customer you’re there and feed their initial interest.

A common example is ‘abandoned cart’ reminders, where brands recover lost sales and move the customer through the funnel at the last moment.

Retention:

The decision has been made, purchase gone through. Now, the customer can be segmented based on data from higher up the funnel.

So, the second key touchpoint can see emails focus on retaining the customer, with audience segmentation and personalised automated campaigns, for example, birthday discounts, brand milestone/anniversaries, exclusive access for loyal customers, post purchase follow ups.

Advocacy:

Your customer is satisfied, and a nurtured relationship has been built. This touchpoint can now act as a gateway to new customers through a raving, loyal customer.

Automated email campaigns turn into information hubs for your segmented customer to push them to talk, such as benefits for referring a friend, exclusive discounts or events.

Get in touch to talk more about how automated email campaigns is the solution to your top-heavy funnel.