Customer retention is one of the primary ways to increase the bottom line at your agency. In fact, increasing customer retention by 5% can boost profits by 95%, according to Bain & Company.

Every agency is looking for the best ways to engage with customers in a way that promotes loyalty. This includes offering competitive prices, instituting a customer loyalty program, hiring dedicated account executives, communicating with customers in a way that fosters relationship, and more.

Each tactic requires different strategies. In this post, we'll take a close look at email marketing and what you can do when it comes to writing effective emails to positively impact customer retention rates.

Why email marketing?

Before getting into how to revamp your email marketing strategy to promote loyalty, it's important to talk about why you should focus on email marketing in the first place.

First and foremost, email marketing continually delivers the strongest ROI out of any other digital marketing channel. In fact, some studies report a 4400% increase in ROI or $44 for every $1 spent. Not to mention, researchers found that you have a 60-70% chance of capturing a sale from an existing customer with email marketing. That's retention!

When push comes to shove, email marketing is a great way to connect with clients, engage customers, foster loyalty, drive sales, and build a relationship. This is evidenced by the high ROIs for various campaigns and repeat purchases from existing customers.

Why is email marketing good for customer retention?

Not only is it important to know why email marketing is a great tool for engaging with clients in general, but it's also great to know why it's good for customer retention, specifically. Here are some of the top reasons:

• Email marketing keeps you in constant contact with your clients. It's difficult to forget about your brand when you show up in your clients' inbox regularly and at appropriate times. If you have a good relationship with your clients, a good way to keep that relationship going is to offer promotions, loyalty rewards, and account updates. In fact, the last thing a client probably wants is to spend a bunch of money with your agency and then hear nothing from you.
• People respond well to email marketing. As mentioned above, people respond well to email marketing. This is why the ROI and conversion rates are so high. Additionally and shockingly, 42% of Americans check their emails in the loo and 18% while driving. While neither of those practices are encouraged, it goes to show that people make a habit out (even a bad one) of checking emails.
• It's cost effective and easy to automate. Not every client acquisition and retention activities are cheap. Email marketing is. Email marketing essentially only costs the amount you pay your service provider each month and what you pay your email marketer and designer. Chances are this is much lower than what you get in return. Not to mention, email marketing is highly automated, making it even more affordable.

Email marketing truly is one of the best strategies for customer retention. Now, let's talk about email marketing strategies you need to make the process smooth sailing.

1. Create a customer journey map

If the purpose of your email marketing campaigns is to increase customer retention, then it's vital to send the right messages, to the right customers, at the right time.

The first step in making sure this happens is creating a customer journey map.

Your customer journey map will outline the steps your customer takes before making a purchase or a repeat purchase. Remember, gone are the days where customers enter into the top of the funnel and exit out the bottom with a one-and-done purchase. Today, there are many different parts of the funnel where your customers may need nurturing. Take the time to outline these steps and state the details of what messages will resonate with customers during different phases of the customer journey.

With regard to retention, you may consider a customer journey map that offers continued support after they make a purchase and encourages them to continue to purchase with your brand.

2. Segment your lists and offer preferences

Not all of your customers are the same. If they were, then it would still be common practice to send mass emails to your customers.

With the help of a smart email service provider, you can create customer profiles and segment lists based on those profiles.

Step one is to collect different data on customers including demographic data, gender, purchasing patterns, location, and more. Then, segment your lists based on this information.

With your lists segmented, you can more easily target your customers with either separate emails or dynamic content.

For example, check out the following email from Emerald Street Fashion.

Emerald Street Fashion offers fashion tips, beauty tips, fun stories, information about what to do when you go out, tips on wellbeing, and interior design advice.

Imagine what a mess their email marketing would be if they included information about all those different categories in all of their messages. Instead, their marketing team can easily create customer profiles based on preferences and nurture customers along the journey based on individual interests.

You'll also notice at the end of the email, Emerald Street Fashion offers customers an opportunity to update their preferences. With a click of a button, customers can opt-in or opt-out of any email list. By giving customers control of what content they receive, you ensure you are nurturing customers with only the content they want to receive.

3. Personalize emails

With better data collection tools and smarter marketing software, personalization is not only becoming more popular in the marketing and advertising world, but it's also a customer expectation.

Don't believe it? Check out some of the most recent stats about personalization, amalgamated by MarTech Today

• By 2018, over 50% of companies will redirect investments towards customer experience innovations, according to Gartner.
• 81% of consumers want brands to understand them better and know when and when not to approach them, according to Accenture.
• 60% of marketers struggle to personalize content in real time, yet 77 percent believe real-time personalization is crucial, according to Adobe.
• 94% of marketers are focusing on their data and analytics capabilities, personalization technologies and customer profile data management capabilities to deliver personalized customer experiences, according to Forrester (commissioned by Janrain).

Email marketing is no exception when it comes to the demand for personalization.

The good news is, the more effort you put in to personalizing your email messages, the better they are received. In fact, 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

Again, with the help of an email service provider, personalization is easy. Tactics like keeping track of customer data with a smart analytics dashboard, building customer profiles, segmenting your lists, using dynamic content, setting up automated emails based on triggers, etc. will help you reach your most loyal customers at the right time and keep them coming back for more.

Wrap Up

Email marketing is one of the best things you can do to boost ROI and increase retention levels. By following the steps listed above, you'll start to see improvements in your client relationships and retention rates.

For more information on how to track your email marketing metrics, as well as all other important KPIs, check out TapClicks today. An omnichannel dashboard and reporting engine does wonders for optimizing email marketing and keeping track of all the data analytics across all marketing campaigns.

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