A study conducted a couple of years ago by Marketing Sherpa shows that consumer engagement with a company occurs preferentially via email, over any other communication channel such as social networks or telephone.
If you are not doing email marketing campaigns to your customers, you are losing a great opportunity; but if you do and you only send promotional messages, the situation is not much better, because you are underutilizing a valuable communication channel.
The average marketing campaign focuses on advertising offers and new products to get customers to make a first purchase.
Below we will review four email marketing campaigns that transcend the purely promotional and aim to build stronger relationships with your current customers.
1. Welcome
A welcome email marketing campaign is more complex than simply confirming a new account.
Early messages should set the tone for interaction with users, educate and encourage people to become active users (an important step on the road to recurring revenue).
Each of these email messages should be brief and polite. Don't aim for deep dives; you will have time and opportunity for that later, if you do things right at this stage.
To initiate this type of campaign:
Integrate your email marketing tool with your CRM platform so you can pull lists of new customers.
Decide what tone your customer service team will use with new users.
Determine the main steps you expect the customer to take to fully engage with your brand/product, and design a message for each of them.
Perform tests by evaluating user engagement metrics and making adjustments as necessary.
2. Continuing Education
Educational messages add value to your customer relationship and position your company as a trusted authority. They also have the added benefit of helping the customer learn more about your business and current trends.
To initiate this type of campaign:
Search your current customer-facing content (blog articles, guides, webinars) and determine the most read content. Start by sharing that.
Adjust your strategy based on engagement metrics.
This includes reducing content not directly involved, creating new content that gets more clicks, and providing shared resources.
Don't risk being considered spam with this strategy. Think of it as a newsletter, so sending more than twice a month is excessive.
3. A deeper commitment
Deepening customer engagement is a great way to use your internal resources as a guide for writing content.
If your customer service team knows about a particular problem that cuts across most users, you can save hours of direct attention by covering that issue in a blog post or video that you share in an email message.
Engagement campaigns also allow you to highlight existing tools and deepen your current customer's understanding of your product.
To initiate this type of campaign:
Consult your customer support and technology teams to find out where customer pain points are. When customers have been with your company a few months, what feature or function should they learn next?
Using the customer research and behavior feature on your site. Are there entire sections customers are missing entirely?
These messages can create active users, as they receive specific information and support for tools or products that they might otherwise overlook.
4. Reducing attrition
Reducing attrition levels starts long before the customer considers other providers. If you have high attrition rates it's because you had, first, an engagement problem, and that requires some investigation.
Determine the average amount of downtime before people cancel and create a "we miss you" campaign to re-engage these customers.
Anti-churn campaigns are a reminder to customers to re-engage with your product or brand. If you plan correctly, you may be able to reactivate the conversation and resolve customer issues before it's too late.
True, it may be the case that some people then realize that they are still paying for your product or service and decide to cancel, but if you wait longer, you may have to issue these customers some kind of refund anyway.
To initiate this type of campaign:
Ask a question. When you solicit feedback from your customers, what you get are customers thinking about your product. Measure engagement through their responses.
Think about running this campaign at scale and on a customized basis first, and when you are confident that your technical support team can handle all the responses, only then do it extensively.
Again, to define future campaigns and determine customer-centric strategies, it is important to use the information derived from your email campaigns, either delivered directly by your customers or deduced from their engagement levels.
By paying close attention to how your customers interact with your communications, you will gain a deeper understanding of your target market and know how to better serve customers from the beginning of their journey.
