Showing posts tagged with: customer retention
Over the next several posts I’ll be addressing a series of email marketing conundrums. A “conundrum” is defined as a puzzling question or problem, and in email there are a few persistent ones I have been asked about on a regular basis since the channel’s earliest days. In fact, these challenges seem to keep so many people up at night that I believe they’re always worthy of discussion and a fresh perspective.
So let’s begin with a classic: How do I prevent or minimize unsubscribes from my email list?
First, make no mistake about it: over the course of their life cycle with you a certain percentage of subscribers will choose to leave your email list despite your best attempts to keep them and believe it or not, this is good. It’s the nature of any permission-marketing channel for the ultimate choice and control over receiving messages to rest in the hands of subscribers. Plus, we know from the channel’s nearly 15 years in existence that commercial email works best when it is deeply rooted in permission. So, your first step is to
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photo credit: aechempati
One of my email seminar students recently asked: “
I feel like the only emails my company ever sends are sales messages: like we’re always asking people to buy, buy, buy. Should we supplement these with other types of email and if so, what?”
Don’t feel bad, lack of variety in email marketing is a common dilemma for many marketers.
Businesses newer to email or with fewer resources tend to gravitate first and only to promotional messaging, but there is plenty more you can and should communicate to your list. Here are just a few of the many greetings and message types you should include in your email program:
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photo credit: mscaprikell
It’s easy to bore your customers to death with email: just send them the same type of message repeatedly and you’ll succeed. We're often guilty of this when we send our e-newsletter and little (or nothing) else. And while a newsletter
absolutely has a place as a staple in your email marketing program, it should be far from the only type of message you send your customers on a regular basis.
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photo credit: doug_wertman
If yours is a services business, B-to-B firm or solo-entrepreneurship, this time of year it can certainly seem like all the marketing focus is on retailers. Yet just because retail eclipses other industries during the holidays doesn’t mean non-retailers can’t take a few lessons from retail marketers and employ similar strategies in their own communications, especially email.
In the spirit of the season, here are three email marketing lessons non-retail businesses can swipe and deploy from holiday retail marketers. Here’s hoping they enlighten your email for 2011!
Vary frequency and cadence seasonally
Retailers live and die by the holiday gift giving season (hence the term “black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the biggest shopping day of the year on which many retail businesses that haven’t yet made an annual profit will go from “being in the red” to “being in the black”). Even before the days of e-commerce, holiday messaging was much more frequent than advertising done at other times of the year. This increase is easy to see in the email marketing frequency of retailers, which goes from monthly or weekly to as often as weekly or daily during November and December.
It may not be at holiday time, but chances are there is a period or there are seasons when it makes sense to increase
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Creative Commons License photo credit: Mooganic
If you’re just tuning into this series,
Part 1 explored the difference between broadcast and triggered-email, explained the role of trigger-based email, and defined the fundamental characteristics that make it so powerful. Here in Part 2 we’ll look at the first two of four must-have triggered-email campaigns no email marketing program should be without.
Welcome and Onboarding: Are You Saying Hello?
I like to think of email in the eyes of the recipient first and foremost as a
conversation marketing channel.
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When I teach email marketing, I always explain that there are two main “flavors” of messages: broadcast email – a uniform message sent to everyone on the list, and triggered email – a message triggered by an event, time or action sent to a specific person for a specific reason. Although you can segment your list and version your broadcast campaigns to specified groups with different offers and creative for say, men vs. women, the real power of personalization and relevance lies in trigger-based email.
Jupiter Research* found that behaviorally-targeted trigger email campaigns get 30% higher open and click-through rates and three times the conversion rates of broadcast email (this is even higher response than tightly-segmented broadcast campaigns receive). And if that’s not enough reason to get on board, eMarketer just reported that
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photo credit: kozumel
On any email list, there will be three populations: the people who love you, the people who like you, and the group who are just hanging in there. Last month I wrote about how to re-engage inactives, but this month I’d like to focus on a far more appealing sector: the people who love you. I call them brand loyalists.
So how do you figure out who's who? Here are five ways to identify brand loyalists on your email list:
- They open more than 80% of your emails. Brand loyalists keep an eye peeled for what you have to say, so when you show up in the inbox they’re curious enough to open and at least skim your message, even if they’re not in the market to buy or respond right then and there.
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If it’s true as I mentioned in
Part 2 of this series that “the gold is in your list”, then not only do you need to prevent that gold from losing its luster with good email list hygiene and data management, you also need to recognize, respect and reward your valued email list members for the treasure they genuinely are.In
Part 1 of this series I explored ways to attract new prospects to your list. Still, the reality for many marketers and business owners is that the majority of their email list subscribers are customers, not prospects. They are people with whom we have an existing (and hopefully, positive) business relationship. All the more reason to value them as the precious asset they are.
Protecting your treasure means honoring what you promised to deliver when you first invited your customers to receive your email, but it goes beyond just living up to expectations.
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