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Retaining Customers with Email Marketing
Businesses place a tremendous amount of emphasis on customer acquisition.
However, it's easy to neglect your most valuable group of prospects: the people who have purchased from you before.
These people are gold: your chances of making a sale to an existing customer is 60 to 70%. The probability of a new customer buying is somewhere between 5 and 20%. It costs anywhere from 5 to 7 times as much to woo a new customer as an old one. And, email is one of your most important tools for keeping your business at the top of people's minds and making it more likely that they'll buy from you again.
A few ways you should be getting in touch
- Newsletters - A regular newsletter allows you to reach out to a customer on a weekly or monthly basis to remind them of your services. Fill it with information that is useful to them: tips on using your product, customer-oriented industry news, and stories about customer success. When it comes time to buy again, they are more likely to pick the business that has been with them all the way.
- Event-triggered emails - Say you own a business that sells contact lenses and sell you sell six months' worth of lenses to a particular customer. At the five month mark, why not send an email asking that customer about their experience and offer a small discount for use on their next order? By reaching out just when customers need you most, you are more likely to win that sale.
- Drip marketing - In business to business marketing, there is often a great deal of research done before a customer is ready to make a purchase. Help them through their buyer's journey by offering an email series about a dilemma they have and how your product can help them solve it. A metal fabricator may send an invitation for an email series about the difference between laser and die punched parts and why a business might choose one over the other. By showing your expertise and authority in the subject, the client may realize that your product or service is the answer to his most pressing challenges.
- Follow-up surveys and customer engagement - If you want to know what your customers want, the best thing you can do is ask them. After someone makes a purchase, follow up with a short survey. If they share any issues they have had with your product, follow up and fix their problem immediately. This sort of attention to customer satisfaction can help secure their loyalty and allow you to learn how to meet your customers' needs best.
By engaging with existing customers anywhere from once a week to once a month, you remind them that your company is out there and ready to give them what they need. Send useful information that gets read, appreciated and shared. Over time, this continued contact can help you retain the customers you have and significantly improve your return on your marketing investment.
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