In my last post, I talked about the importance of lifecycle marketing; using your marketing to grow, nurture and strengthen the relationships you have with your customers, rather than just ‘selling’ to them. These lifecycle marketing strategies can be applied to your own email marketing campaigns, helping you to achieve increased, continuing success with this highly effective promotional method.
In the previous post, I talked about ways to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list, and how you can welcome them once they’ve signed up. But, there’s more to lifecycle email marketing than that. It can be applied to every part of the customer journey. Here are the further stages of lifecycle email marketing:
3. Turning Subscribers Into Paying Customers
Turning your subscribers into paying customers can be easier said than done. Just because a person has expressed an interest in what you do by signing up to your mailing list, it doesn’t mean that they will automatically buy from you straight away. They may have budgetary constraints, or they may not yet feel confident that yours is the company that they want to buy from.
You can combat this by marking yourself as an authority in your particular field. Rather than just using email to ‘sell’ to your customers, use it to keep them informed. Send your customers ‘how to’ guides, ebooks and links to informative videos. This will give them more confidence in your company and what you do.
TJ Hughes recently sent this email, offering their readers winter driving tips, along with links to useful products:
If budgetary constraints are the issue, you can periodically offer discounts or special deals to the loyal customers on your mailing list. Groupon sent this email recently:
The discount is the most prominent part of this email, and they’ve made it as easy as possible for their customers to redeem it.
4. Nurturing Your Customer Relationships
Once your customers have purchased from you once, you will want them to keep doing so into the future. In order for this to happen, you will have to continually nurture the relationships you have with them. It’s at this stage you can use the data you’ve collected about your customers to make your email output more personalised and relevant. Send them an email wishing them a happy birthday and, if they’ve expressed an interest in any particular products or ranges, use your marketing emails to keep them updated.
This is an example of a birthday email from Ikea:
This highly personal email (they’ve included both my name and the year I was born) also includes a small discount to encourage a sale.
Nurturing a relationship also means apologising when you do something wrong. If you make a mistake, either with your emails or on your website, use your marketing emails to apologise for it. This will show your customers that you care about getting everything right for them.
Roman Originals sent this email, along with a 10 percent discount, to apologise to their customers for their website being down:
5. Winning Back Lapsed Customers
Even with an effective lifecycle email strategy, not every customer will stay interested in what you do forever. It’s then your job to try and win back these lapsed customers and encourage them to purchase from you again. If a customer hasn’t engaged with or purchased from you for a while, send them a email to say you miss them. You could also include a special offer or discount to encourage them to click through to your site, like in this email from The Hut:
If then customer still doesn’t engage, you can remove them from your mailing list.
As you can see, a lifecycle email strategy can help ensure that your customers and subscribers are constantly engaged and interested at every stage of their relationship with you. By adopting some of these ideas, you could get a lot more out of your email marketing efforts.
