How email marketing can help improve client retention

When it comes to email, many teams only ever consider its impact on lead generation and driving new business. However, while attracting prospective clients is a great use for email, it’s also important to take advantage of the channel to positively impact your current client base.

If you’re anything like most brands, you’re always looking for new ways to combat churn. According to Gigaoam Research, email marketing has been cited as the most effective digital channel for customer retention. By nurturing your base with timely content and messaging, you can build brand advocates and retain more clients than ever before. Here’s how.

1. Kick things off on the right foot

Email automation is the key to making the most of your resources and content: It helps you save time, repurpose content, and they get great results. In fact, welcome emails specifically get 4X the open rates and 5X the clickthrough rates of business-as-usual mailings. This is the highest performing email you could ever send, so don’t miss this critical opportunity to build customer loyalty.  

For instance, FIT4MOM provides each of their locations this three-part automated welcome series to send new clients.

It extends a warm welcome, offers them a free pass to try out a new class, and helps get them connected to the larger FIT4MOM community.

2. Surprise and delight on special occasions

Your clients want to feel wanted, so let them know you care about their personal milestones with date-based automated messages. You can use the data you collect during signup to create an automated email that will send on your subscribers’ birthdays or membership anniversaries.

A personalized birthday message is table stakes in the email marketing game these days, so if you can get ahold of that data, it’s a great way to start segmenting your clients. This sort of message gives people a nice, warm-and-fuzzy impression of your brand. Plus, birthday emails can lift conversion rates by 60% over non-birthday email messages with the same offer (ClickZ), making them an incredibly effective marketing tactic.

3. The more targeted, the better

64% of people say that customer experience is more important than price, according to Gartner. Segmenting to deliver personalized, helpful email is step one for creating a great inbox experience.

Instead of blasting your entire client base with the same messaging and content, send them targeted, relevant, hyper-personalized email. How do you do that, you ask? First of all, think about who actually needs to hear each message: If your email contains news about a particular location, for instance, only send to those clients. For instance, during the recent hurricanes, School of Rock sent closing updates only to their subscribers at impacted locations.

It’s also important to pay attention to your clients’ individual interests. For instance, Orangetheory Fitness sent this promotion only to clients they had signed up at a recent bridal show.

While you may not already have access such useful audience data, you can easily determine what your clients care about most by paying attention to your response results over time. Watch what they’re opening and clicking, serve them more of that type of content, and they’ll reward you with higher engagement.

4. Provide value above all else

While it might be tempting to use email marketing to upsell and push new promotions, it’s important to balance that type of messaging with content that’s genuinely helpful to your clients. Whether it’s workout videos, recipes, blog posts, or even just a goofy video of your staff, always incorporate engaging content into your email strategy.

In this email, rather than simply promoting a new series of classes, SoulAnnex also offered subscribers a fun workout playlist curated by their instructors. Including something free and helpful in each campaign helps build a positive association with your clients, and they’ll be more likely to open future emails as a result.

Email marketing for customer retention is all about making sure your clients know that they matter to your organization. Ignored audiences often become lost ones, and client retention is much easier (and less expensive) than client acquisition. So be sure you use email to continually nurture those you’ve already won – not only is it good customer service, it’s great marketing.