Customer retention with email marketing
Businesspeople and marketers know that winning a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one …
Yet with all the effort that goes into winning new customers, once you have gained a new account or a sale, it is by no means certain that you’ll be able to retain them for future business.
There are some commonly recognised reasons why businesses lose customers. According to research conducted by Howard Feiertag and John Hogan the most common reasons are:
1. Customer moves (4%)
2. Customer is introduced or referred to another company (5%)
3. Competition wins customer over by use of promotions, marketing etc. (9%)
4. Customer is dissatisfied with product or service (15%)
5. No customer contact and relationship strategy (67%)
It’s clear from Feiertag and Hogan’s analysis that generally businesses are not investing enough resources into maintaining relationship and ongoing communication with their existing customers.
Email marketing can help your customer retention strategy. Email is the ideal medium to maintain customer contact throughout the business lifecycle. Email newsletters provide a unique opportunity to keep your customers informed about any company activity, new products, special discounts, and industry updates.
Fortunately, modern email marketing programmes like Melbourne IT’s Email promoter provide an easy-to-use interface allowing anyone, regardless of their technical or HTML skills, to send professional looking email messages to a large list of recipients, and more importantly track results.
Customer segmentation. Tools like Email Promoter offer the capability to segment a customer database into qualified recipient clusters, thus allowing businesses to broadcast highly targeted messages. As example of using segmented data is where a business has 1000’s subscribers to a monthly newsletter but would choose to send a special promotional message only to those who haven’t purchased a product for more than six months (or only those based in Perth etc.). The secret to a good segmentation strategy is to ensure you collect as much relevant data from your customers when they sign up for your newsletter or create an account with your company.
Results tracking and analysis. Email marketing allows you to track and monitor results for each newsletter or email promotion your send out.
So when you start sending your periodic newsletters and promotions don’t forget to monitor the following key performance indicators:
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Open rate: How many recipients actually open and view your email messages.
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Click through rate: How many recipients click on a link on your newsletter to read more about your news or visit your website.
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Bounce rate: How many emails bounce back (due to old email data, or recipient’s inbox being full etc.)
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Forward rate: How many recipients have forwarded your message on to another customer or a friend.
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Unsubscribe rate: How many recipients have chosen to unsubscribe from receiving future newsletters.
These indicators will help you monitor your results and fine tune your email newsletters.
Interacting with customers and getting their feedback. Email is a quick and convenient medium that provides your business with a two-way communication strategy, and it allows your customers to provide feedback on products and services or log support enquiries. Using a targeted and informative newsletter you can be proactive in providing your customers with excellent service and support.
Get your customer retention strategy in place with Melbourne IT’s Email Promoter …
- Email Promoter explained (video)
- Related articles: Launching and managing a winning email newsletter
FREE E-book. Set up an Email Promoter account in November and receive our FREE E-book “Things you need to know to launch an email newsletter”