Introduction
Customer loyalty remains the crucial X-factor' for eMarketers driven by the fact that it costs anywhere upwards of 6 times more to acquire a new customer than to engage an existing one. That will never change. So the quicker marketers get the loyalty formula right, the quicker they'll get profitable.
Cultivating long-term relationships with customers is no different than cultivating personal relationships in life. Loyalty develops over time and the main ingredients that establish it are simple trust and value: the trust customers have in your products & services and the value your email messages carry for those customers.
Sounds great, but how do marketers establish these two critical components with customers to win their loyalty and enjoy long-term profitability?
One word: Relevance!
The more relevance infused into your email communications, the faster you'll be able to build trustworthy relationships, and send value-based messages that keep customers coming back for more. Without a doubt, there's no better discipline to generate loyalty than email marketing.
Done right, it has an immediacy that empowers business owners to achieve super strong bonds with their customers. And that's why as the graph illustrates SMBs to Fortune 500 companies are turning to email marketing to take their business to the next level.
The main ingredients: Relevance = trust + value
One irrelevant communication can end a valuable buyer/seller relationship diligently built up over time. Therefore, marketers must be sure every email message they send is valuable enough for recipients to open and read. Bear in mind, not only do repeat customers spend more and generate larger transactions; but many will pay higher prices in exchange for a long-term relationship that promotes real value and trust components they can't enjoy anywhere else.
That's why meeting the customer's expectations is a great starting point but merely just a start point exceeding the customer's expectations (send after send) is the key to driving your long-term success. Be aware that marketers who infuse relevance into their communications consistently outperform the competition. So forget about archaic buzz words like market share, successful eMarketers today all think in terms of customer share. Here are five simple email marketing tactics that do just that revolutionize customer loyalty.
Top loyalty building tactics:
1 The virtual handshake
Building customer loyalty through email marketing is all about the list. That's because a detailed, well-maintained list yields trust and higher response. Without a healthy list nurtured over time, marketers will be forced into the costly alternative of renting one, knowing little or nothing about the opt-in profiles or campaign preference information of the people on it. So what can a marketer do to avoid getting caught up in this scenario? Easy, build your own opt-in subscriber list quick by obtaining that all-important virtual handshake'. Easier said than done.
Although you'd think the concept of permission to email mandatory; laying the proper groundwork for a trust-based relationship by obtaining the customer's permission is actually an afterthought for many marketers. Strange as it sounds, many companies fail miserable at this practice and, in doing so, end a potential profitable relationship before it begins.
To grow an internal database quick, start by simplifying the registration process, making it super easy for browsers to opt-in today, to be able to fully leverage that customer's motivation for subscribing tomorrow.
Prominently position and strategically place opt-in requests at critical customer touch points on your site. Also, be sure to incorporate a double opt-in mechanism into the registration process, followed by timely welcome messaging' as a highly effective tactic to further build trust with your customers. And, like any relationship online or off, always provide the subscriber with a high level of transparency during the registration process.
Best practices dictate to give the subscriber clear opt-out instructions and unsubscribe links, reiterate your organization's privacy policy, provide an easy access preference page where the subscriber can check their own options, an email address for feedback or sender contact, and a telephone contact number (email is fast but a telephone number is faster). In short, give the subscriber more control during the registration process, and you'll not only meet their expectations, but exceed them.
