The days where you could send a generic email to your entire customer base are long gone. Today’s shoppers want personalized content, customized offers, and to support businesses that align with their values.
Furthermore, people are busier than ever. The average person receives over 120 emails every day, but only opens those that seem relevant to their wants or needs. If you want to build customer trust and loyalty through email marketing, you’re going to have to make your messages stand out in your audience’s overcrowded inboxes.
There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to succeeding at email marketing, but you can increase your open rates and improve customer engagement by using the following tips.
Segment Your Audience
Segmenting your audience is the first step in creating more relevant messages for your customers. Segmentation can be as precise or as generalized as you like, so long as you can tailor specific content for each group. For example, you might choose to segment your audience based on data such as:
- Demographics: Includes customers’ age, location, gender, education level, etc.
- Purchase frequency: How often your customers shop at your business.
- Top referrers: People who reliably bring new shoppers to your business.
- New subscribers: People who recently purchased something for the first time, signed up for your newsletter or subscribed to a social media page.
- Highly engaged subscribers: Customers who always interact with the content you release by writing reviews, sharing your posts, or participating in contests.
- Returning customers: People who purchase items from your store at least twice.
- Abandoned carts: Abandoned cart emails remind shoppers about the products they left in their cart, often adding an incentive to encourage them to complete the purchase.
- Customer interests: Based on customers’ past purchases, you can send them tailored emails with content they’d most likely be interested in. This also ties into personalized messages.
- Lead magnets: Lead magnets include content that doesn’t require a customer to make a purchase, such as eBooks, webinars, or free samples. These messages should introduce the potential customer to everything your business has to offer.
Send Personalized Messages
If people get an email that doesn’t interest them, they’ll likely delete it without even taking the time to read it. Therefore, it’ll take an attention-grabbing subject line to get a customer to actually open and read your message. Using the customer’s name in the subject line is one tactic that can grab their attention right away, but the deeper personalization occurs in the message itself.
If you get your audience segmented accurately, you should have a pretty good understanding of what each group wants and needs. From here, you can use individual customer data to:
- Optimize send times based on each person’s open rates.
- Remind them of items left in their carts.
- Cross-sell products based on their browsing history.
- Recommend content relevant to their wants or needs.
- Include special deals for items similar to products they’ve purchased before.
Show Transparency
People want to do business with brands they can trust. To gain their loyalty, you need to go beyond traditional email marketing messages. Customer rewards, free samples, and other benefits are enticing, but brands that can connect with their audiences on an emotional level will create a lasting impact.
The key to transparency is sharing things that reflect your brand’s mission, your company culture, and guiding values. You can help humanize your business by sharing content like:
- User-generated content (UGC) from social media, such as photos or videos.
- Customer testimonials and reviews.
- Charities or organizations your company supports.
- Employee highlights.
- Blog posts about how your company is making a positive difference.
- Photos or videos of your employees.
Try Interactive Marketing Strategies
Are people opening your emails but not engaging with any of the content? Interactive marketing might be the solution you’ve been looking for!
As you can probably tell from the name, interactive marketing includes UX elements that customers can engage with directly from their email. There are plenty of options for incorporating interactive marketing strategies into your email campaigns, including:
- Gifs and hover-over images.
- Polls, quizzes, or surveys.
- Interactive carousels for showcasing products.
- Prize drawings.
- Interactive holiday or birthday cards.
- Trivia games.
Offer Incentives to Past Customers
Oftentimes, inactive customers who haven’t purchased from your store in a while can be easily won over with a well-timed email and a few personalized perks. Making an effort to reconnect with past shoppers and offering them personalized discounts is a great way to turn one-time customers into loyal buyers.
On the other hand, old customers might not find your business valuable to them anymore. In this case, your messages will have to deliver content that’s relevant and useful to their lives, even if they don’t end up purchasing anything right away. Over time, as they gain more trust in your company’s expertise, they’ll be more open to purchasing items from you again.
Reward Loyalty with Special Perks
There are all kinds of ways you can show appreciation to your loyal customers. Whether it’s sending them discounts on their birthdays or rewarding people after they purchase a certain number of items, rewarding them for their continued loyalty is a great way to further establish trust. Some suggested loyalty drivers that can make customers feel appreciated include:
- Early access to sales.
- Additional discounts.
- Double points for specific purchases.
- Free gifts with purchases.
- Free shipping.
- Exclusive content for VIP members only.
- Invitation-only events or webinars.
- Genuine thank-you notes.
Remember, customers who feel appreciated will feel compelled to show their appreciation by continuing to do business with you!
Conclusion
Want to set up automated email campaigns for each of your audience segments but don’t know where to begin? What about tailoring messages for different customers based on their demographic info? If you need help getting started with your revamped marketing strategy, Content Cucumber is the professional writing service for you!
Content Cucumber will match you with your own writer who can create emails, blog posts, product descriptions, or any other written content your business needs. If you want a test run of our services, get a free 400-word article on the topic of your choice by texting ORANGE to 812-301-2040. We can’t wait to hear from you!
