Retain Customers with These 5 Types of Emails

The growth and success of a business depend on both acquiring new customers and maintaining existing customers. However, the most critical factor above all is coming up with an effective strategy for customer maintenance and retention. Customer retention strategies hold immense benefits to a business, such as these:

• It ensures that customers maintain a positive view of your business after receiving a service or buying goods. This helps create excellent customer relations, which leads to an increase in the customer base.
• It leads to the addition of market value, as the cost of maintaining customers is much less than the cost of acquiring new ones. The cost of an advertisement geared toward gaining new customers is lowered when existing customers are maintained.
• A good customer retention strategy leads to an increase in the number of sales as reps can often cross-sell or upsell products and services to happy and satisfied customers, leading to an increase in revenue.

Sending emails is one of the most effective strategies in customer retention, according to most proficient marketers. Although we are accustomed to welcome emails where a customer is sent an automatic mail upon visiting and signing up at a website, there are other kinds of emails that marketers can put to good use.

Let’s look at the different types of emails marketers should have in their arsenals.

1. Welcome emails. Most marketers send a welcome email to clients after they subscribe to their services or sign up for a newsletter. Sending a welcome email to new customers, subscribers, or sign-ups serves as a reminder of their intention when they were first subscribing or signing up. It is also a timely and a polite way of making a brief introduction to new clients, where you can describe your products and services to them and also at the same time direct them to your customer care for further help.

Last but not least, welcome emails are comforting and convincing. New customers are more attracted to a business or service where they received a welcome email than to one where they didn’t, even if both are dealing with the same products or services.

2. Friendly reminder emails. Occasionally it is necessary to update or remind existing customers about the products and services you are offering. Reminders are mainly used by e-commerce stores to hark back to shoppers when they fail to purchase goods or abandon the cart. It also helps to highlight relevant commodities to shoppers.

In service-based businesses, reminder emails are used to increase the customer base through upselling and cross-selling, effectively notifying customers of additional services offered by the business. Reminder emails also provide a great channel for subscription services to alert customers of payments due, or to update customers on starting payment for a subscription after a free trial.

3. Gift and exclusive offer emails. People are always anticipating offers or special promotions from a brand, and customers often sign up to receive emails of these offers and promotions. During significant events and occasions within a year, it is always smart to send a reward email associated with that event to customers. These events may include holidays, the birthday of the subscriber, end-of-year special offers, etc. Rewards and promotions engage customers and make them invest more in your business.

4. Feedback request emails. Customers are the fundamental pillar of every business. Their involvement in the business operation, not only by buying products but through the decision-making process, is vital. Customer involvement comes through in their suggestions and their responses to the products and services offered. A feedback email is sent out to show customers that their opinions or responses are highly valued. Feedback emails are a polite way of requesting that customers take quick surveys that can be used to obtain useful market information. It also serves the purpose of keeping customers engaged and using positive feedback to improve your business.

5. Re-engagement emails. Eventually, even engaged customers may stop interacting with businesses; this is especially the case with subscription-based businesses. Re-engagement emails serve the sole purpose of pulling back these customers. These emails are sent when a person has unsubscribed from your service, to lure them back to your brand. A special discount, for instance, is offered to encourage the customer to sign up again; the offer is not necessarily permanent but works effectively in re-engagement emails (for example, 10 percent off, or one month’s free subscription).

Any number of factors can determine whether customers stick with your business or not. There are as many customer retention strategies as there are marketing approaches, and you should always try any possible method to retain your customers. These five types of emails have proved to be among the tried-and-true strategies for retaining customers—and they should retain an important place in your marketing toolbox.

Whitney Blankenship is content marketing manager at Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Blankenship is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, e-commerce, and social media trends. She’s obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal; powered by coffee; and the tastest Googler in the West. Follow her on Twitter.