While markets become increasingly competitive, customers more demanding, and at a time when inflation heavily impacts consumption patterns, mastering the art of Customer Relationship becomes essential for thriving.
At the core of your loyalty strategy lies precisely email marketing, a powerful tool that can transform the way you interact with your target audience.
How to use your email marketing strategy to boost customer loyalty and engagement? Strategy, practices, and best usage: follow Dartagnan’s expert advice.
Customer Relationship at the heart of your performance
Changing buying behaviors
As a result of a survey conducted among 5,000 buyers in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, the annual report on European e-commerce by the Coleman Parkes Research firm highlights the pessimistic outlook related to the economic environment.
Its consequences: a major change in buying behaviors that compels online retailers to evolve their customer acquisition and loyalty strategies. Price reassessment, deferred payments, multi-channel sales: there are numerous strategies to stand out in the game. Among them, the question of Customer Relationship becomes central.
Customer Loyalty: a strategic performance challenge
In a context of uncertainties and fluctuations that have particularly marked the retail sector in recent months, loyalty has become a major challenge for brands. It not only allows maintaining a stable customer base but also reduces acquisition costs, which are often higher than retention costs.
According to a Harvard Business Review study, increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to a profit increase of 25% to 95%. This underscores how crucial your loyalty strategies are for the longevity of your brand.
Among all the marketing channels at your disposal, the impact and performance of email on your customer relationship are unbeatable. And here’s why.
Why make email the heart of your customer relationship?
Speak to your customers throughout their journey
Easy to design, quick to produce, and cost-effective, email allows you to multiply your communications and stay in constant contact with your customers.
Introducing new collections, announcing promotions, responding to customer inquiries, promoting brand values, collecting feedback… There are numerous opportunities to address your audience, and email gives you the ability to seize them all.
Segment and target your most strategic customers
Coupled with a proven predictive analysis technique, segmenting your email database can enable you to:
Paired with a proven predictive analysis technique, segmenting your email database can enable you to:
- Identify high-potential conversion customers and focus your marketing efforts on them.
Conversely, identify at-risk customers to offer personalized and high-quality offers to reduce your churn.
In summary, your email database is a perfect entry point to optimize your targeting strategy and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.
Personalization: a powerful loyalty driver
According to a Campaign Monitor study, personalized emails can increase click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%. How can such an impact be explained?
A good strategy for personalization via email involves echoing the individual needs, interests, and desires of each customer to create a more engaging and relevant experience. This is what giants like Spotify do, pushing email recommendations for playlists, albums, or artists based on their subscribers’ listening habits.
By facilitating the connection with your router and allowing you to integrate personalization variables and dynamic content, the Dartagnan Email Builder offers you the opportunity to create highly personalized messages and recommendations, thus significantly increasing the open and click-through rates of your email marketing.
Automate your emails for optimized customer relationship
Intelligent automation of your email campaigns now allows you to send the right message to the right people at the right time without constant manual effort.
However, with “automation” comes a large volume of production: to be able to create customer journeys of this kind, you must also be able to industrialize your email production process. In other words, creating a maximum number of campaigns in a minimum amount of time and thus designing triggers for every customer journey event.
How? Follow the example of Center Parcs, which successfully deployed its new brand identity throughout all of its email journeys with the help of Dartagnan. The result of this well-oiled mechanism: more than 28% increase in revenue and a +26% conversion rate. Learn more.
How to optimize your customer relationship with your email strategy?
What email triggers for your customer relationship?
In terms of customer relationships, there are several essential transactional emails for your marketing strategy.
- Bienvenue email
- Abandoned cart
- Order confirmation or tracking
- Birthday email
- Thank you email
- Reactivation of inactive emails
- Onboarding tutorial emails
- Event announcements
- Event registration confirmation
- Price changes
- Blog and news alerts
- Order feedback
- Unsubscribe email
By deploying all of these Triggered Email Marketing, you ensure better control over your target audience and a strong relationship with all of your customers throughout their journeys.
What sequences and email strategies for your loyalty programs?
In addition to these classics of Trigger email, there are some well-thought-out email sequences that can also help increase your customer retention rate.
Sneak peeks and exclusive offers: Before the holidays, major marketing events, or sales, rely on your email campaigns to promote your exclusive offers in advance and show your customers that you prioritize them.
Reward programs: Reward programs can be easily integrated into your email marketing strategy. According to a Forrester study, 72% of online adults in the United States belong to at least one loyalty program. Sending emails to inform customers about their accumulated points or available rewards can encourage them to return.
Satisfaction surveys: Your email campaigns are your best entry point to gather customer feedback and measure their satisfaction rates in real-time to adjust your product and service strategies.
Brand image campaigns: Your emails can be a fantastic showcase to highlight your brand values, nurture your relational marketing, and gain the loyalty of your customers.
Loyalty program campaigns: Don’t hesitate to deploy dedicated email sequences to promote your loyalty programs and ways to make the most of them.
What KPIs to monitor to optimize the performance of your loyalty programs?
Open rate, click-through rate, engagement rate: these are KPIs that we often see. But are you also paying attention to the following KPIs?
Retention Rate: A key indicator of customer loyalty, an increase in this rate after an email marketing campaign can indicate a positive impact on the customer relationship. According to a Harvard Business Review study, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company profits by 25% to 95%. High retention rate = satisfied customers. By measuring retention rate before and after an email marketing campaign, you can evaluate its effectiveness in terms of customer loyalty.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Another crucial metric, NPS measures the willingness of customers to recommend your product or service to others on a scale of 0 to 10. A high NPS is generally a good indicator of customer satisfaction and can be a reliable predictor of revenue growth. NPS is more than just a number; it gives you a direct insight into how your brand is perceived by your customers. A high NPS means that your customers are not only satisfied but are also willing to act as brand ambassadors.
The Long-Term Engagement Rate (LER): The Long-Term Engagement Rate (LER) is an advanced metric that measures customer engagement throughout their lifecycle. Unlike traditional measures that focus on individual interactions, LER takes into account all interactions over an extended period. LER provides you with a 360-degree view of the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns in terms of customer engagement. It allows you to understand how your emails influence long-term customer behavior, including repeat purchases, time spent on your website, and interaction with other marketing channels.
Want to learn more about Dartagnan?
Schedule a meeting with one of our experts for a demo of our solution.
In a nutshell, what is Dartagnan? It's the essential tool to assist you in designing innovative campaigns and streamlining the production of your emails!
