Email Marketing

Email for Retention

As with most businesses online you also need to acquire new customers and keep existing customers loyal. Far often many companies fail to leverage existing customer relationships, rewarding new customers and often forgetting their loyal customer base. Customer retention is not only easier to achieve than customer acquisition, but is often more cost effective.

‘Repeat customers spend, on average, 67% more than a new customer whilst retaining a customer costs 5 to 10 times less than acquiring one’.

Tactics for Retention

Analyzing customer lists and any data you hold about the history of your relationship with could be your starting point for any retention email marketing campaign. The more knowledge you have about your customers the better your marketing campaigns will run.

Once you have an up to date customer list, you could divide these it into segments. How you choose to group them could depend on your business objectives, but typical segmentation would involve dividing customers according to buying patterns or length of time since their last purchase. The profiles of these groups could provide the basis for your email campaign planning and strategy.

Retention Objectives

Just as with an Email acquisition campaign, it could be important for you to establish a success-criteria for your retention campaigns before you begin the planning. The objective of your campaign in the first instance may be simply to raise awareness and gain attention.

One way your could achieve this could be to send a highly personalized email, from an account manager or ‘Your Internal Team’, thanking them for their past custom and linking to an item of interest, for example sign up to a newsletter, find out more about the great value your new your services provide, Refer-A-Friend to get £? FREE credit etc.

Your first step may be to focus on ‘Refer-A-Friend to get £x FREE credit’ – And for this reason it is particularly important in that your emails are highly personalized.

NOTE: few customers could appreciate, or respond to emails that are blatant selling opportunities. Few of us like to be sold to – instead we prefer to make informed, self-guided choices at our own pace.

Timings and planning

• You could start by sending out a RAF newsletter once a month.
• Copy and structure could be developed in line with best practices and performing keywords.
• The positioning of content, with the RAF copy & CTA button could be displayed at the top of the email along with social media icons (focus).
• The copy could be created to be engaging and useful to existing customers, not sales orientated pushing plans (whether or not they are interested in the RAF, to build confidence with the customer that your newsletters are always worth opening and reading)
• Links should only be added to your HTML template once you have final copy agreed and approved through your legal or compliance dept.
• Email’s to your existing customer base should always be developed and sent using professional in-house or third party resources.

Email ‘Best Practices’ tips

Key email performance KPIs:

• Delivery rate (Aim for a rate of 95% or higher)
• Open rate (Aim for an open rate of 20% or higher)
• Click Through Rate (Aim for a CTR of 4% or higher)
• Conversion Rate (Depends on the type of email you’re sending)
• Unsubscribe Rate (Aim for no more than 2% or lower)
• Bounce Rate (Aim for no more than 2% or lower)
• List Growth Rate (The higher your list grows, the better your emails are performing)

Key email revenue KPIs to watch:

• Return On Investment (ROI): Currently email has one of the highest ROIs in the industry – £38 for every £1 generated)
• Revenue per email subscriber ( You want to maximise this KPI as much as is possible)
• Revenue per email (You’ll want to know how much each email is generating and what it means to your overall strategy)

Top Ten Email Tips

1. Here are the top tips to help you ensure you achieve successful rates for your key email KPIs:

2. Start with a clear brief that outlines clearly and in a simplified manner what you’re trying to achieve.

3. Make sure the data you’re looking to use is clean to avoid high bounce rates.

4. Build your email template to ensure it’s interactive and engaging. What’s more, make sure it’s firstly mobile enabled (most emails are viewed through mobile devices) and secondly overall device enabled (Tablets, PC, Laptop). KEY: Across all devices, your email must render correctly to give the reader the best experience and ensure they engage and interact.

5. The design of your email template, will very much depend on the automation software you employ to deliver your emails. Make sure you choose an email platform that applies best practice such as for example, having a text version as backup should the HTML version not reach your customer. Currently, Hubspot and Salesforce are the two most popular.

6. Make sure the cotent of your email is SIMPLE and straightforward to follow. If you’re driving customers to a landing page, make sure the bulk of the information is there leaving just the key and relevant information is in your email ONLY. If you’re not driving customers to an online destination, make sure the content in your email is not too heavy and is laid out in a clear manner for your reader.

7. One of keys to successful email enagement is to ensure that you use every opportunity to personalise your email with great effect.MAKE THE READER FEEL LIKE THEY’RE THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS RECEIVED YOUR EMAIL. Depending on the quality of your data, personaisation should start with the subject line (if possible/applicable) and then can be built within the content of the email (where possible/applicable) even within graphics/imagery. Make it clear from the outset (in your brief) where this personalisation should be present.

8. Email Call To Actions (CTAs): As part of keeping your email straightforward and simple, you MUST have CLEAR CTAs in order to give the customer the best opportunity of engaging and performing an action. Ensure depending on the length of the email, your first CTA is in first view (above the fold). Don’t assume a customer will read the full email before performing the action.

9. Subject lines: The first stage of interaction with the customer for your email campaign, is getting them to open it. To do this, make sure your subject line gives the customer the key reason to open your email. IT NEEDS TO BE RELEVANT AND ENTICING. Personalisation helps.

10. Ensure you give your customers the chance to Opt in first rather than Opt out first. You want to ensure you build a longterm releationship with the customer so be CLEARas to why they should opt in. Also, give them subscription options which could include type of emails to receive, frequency etc..

11. Last but not least, make sure you build into your email testing requirements. This will involve making sure the email template is built with tracking in key areas to include:

• Links
• Landing page tracking from email behaviour
• Images/graphics
• CTAs

1. This should lead to building in a number of testing strategies which may involve:

• Time of email send
• Copy and content testing
• Customer segment testing