How to Deliver an Exceptional Customer Experience with Email Marketing

In the age of information overload, it can be tricky to grab and retain your customers’ attention for a prolonged period of time. They are targeted by dozens of companies every day, and for your email to stand out, it has to offer an engagement-based experience that’s unlike anything they’ve ever encountered before.

Enter well-strategized and -executed email marketing. With 83 percent of people confessing their fondness for email communication coming from brands, it’s only normal for this form of digital marketing to remain among the most effective advertising strategies.

Factor in the 99 percent of global consumers checking their inboxes every day, and you’ve got a tried-and-tested method of developing long-term relationships with your clients you can start integrating into your business today.

What are the Benefits of Email Marketing?

The question about whether or not email marketing is worth it is easily answered by the following statistics:

Used by hundreds of thousands of companies across the globe, it has managed to acquire a good reputation for a variety of reasons:

• Tracking is easy: If things start going south, you will be able to spot that right away. Most if not all email marketing software allows you to keep track of various metrics, like open and click-through rates, conversion rates, and note what works best with your target audience.

• The list of prospects is already formed: Speaking about the audience, those who signed up for your newsletter are already hooked on your brand. This means that they are not only the right fit for your email ads but are also the most likely to go through with purchase when given the offer.

• It doesn’t cost a lot: Unlike print and media advertising, email marketing doesn’t involve high costs. In fact, the only cost you will have is the software you decide to use.

• There’s no need for extra skills: The upside of this form of marketing is that your in-house team – and even you – can single-handedly craft those fancy-looking email campaigns that are guaranteed to receive a high open-rate of over 18 percent. All it takes is a couple of hours of figuring out how your choice of email marketing platform works, and you’ll be ready to get crafty soon after.

• The results are almost immediate: Email communication is known for its immediacy, and this is an advantage that  – if used correctly – can make your revenue skyrocket. Add an urgency-based call-to-action to your weekly newsletter, and you’ll convert your leads into customers in no time.

4 Proven Strategies to Elevate Your Customer Experience

1. Aim to Get Personal with Every Outreach

No matter if this is your first email to this customer or the 15th, your number one priority should be to make it as personal as possible. The results of a study conducted by Experian Marketing Services explained the reason for it best; it turns out that you can increase your transaction rates by sixfold if you personalize your emails.

There are several ways you can get personal’ with your customers (and no, we’re not talking about the lazy practice of mentioning their names) via email. Sending them abandoned cart and “based on your purchase of X, you might like Y” type of emails is just one way to go about it.

The sure way to nail it with personalization every time you compose an email is to be continuously collecting their data and seeking feedback, too. This way, you’ll be able to send them limited-time discounts on their birthdays and upsell products and services they’re most interested in.

2. Give Them an Opportunity to Choose the Emails They Receive

There’s nothing more damaging to a company’s image than sending your prospects dozens of emails that annoy them to the point of wanting to unsubscribe. This does no good to either of the parties and is known to lead to negative word of mouth. To prevent this train of events, consider offering your customers an option to subscribe to emails they would genuinely like to get.

As their engagement behaviors tend to change over time, you should set a date to reach out to them again so that they can update their preferences. Such practice will make them stay subscribed to your company’s latest updates and make purchasing decisions accordingly.

3. Acknowledge and Reward Loyal Customers

You probably know by now that gaining new customers is much more costly than retaining the existing ones – five times more expensive, to be precise. They are also 16 times pricier to nurture and develop long-term relationships with. This brings us to the next point – figure out ways to make your die-hard customers stay and tailor your email content to this segmented audience too.

Use these practical tips as guidance:

• Show them your appreciation by sending occasional “thank you” notes
• Provide them with early access to your company’s new product launches
• Offer certain discounts for their next purchase
• Include them in your monthly “customer of the month” emails
• Send them invitations to exclusive events organized by your company

4. Provide Value

It helps to look beyond your quarterly sales goals and dive deeper into the content your emails contain. Ideally, it should be aligned with your company’s positioning and consist of useful information that would eliminate the need for your customer to search for the answers to his questions somewhere else.

Take camera gear companies as an example. Apart from promoting the array of cameras they supply, you’ll often find them sending their customers hands-on guides in the form of PDFs and/or videos on how to use them, what features they have and how to shoot the most sought-after pictures. You’re thus killing two birds with one stone – telling them how their camera of interest can come in handy and where to purchase it.

Long story short

Approach emails the way you approach conversations with your friends, i.e., recognize that there’s someone on the receiving end and cater it to their interests. You wouldn’t want to bore your friend with 5-pages-worth of pointless chatter, and neither would you want to get on their nerves by telling them the same story over and over again.

Instead, focus on what matters most and deliver it in a way that keeps them engaged all the way through the conversation. This way, just like customers, they will show interest in carrying on conversing with you and might even follow your advice should you give any.

Author Bio

Mikkel Andreassen is passionate about customer experience in every color of the beautiful customer engagement spectrum. He loves building great connections with his customers, which often lead to meaningful friendships that last a lifetime and inspire his work. Driven by the genuine belief that CX is the pivotal force that drives a successful business, he is currently at the helm of Dixa’s customer experience strategy.