After some time and multiple visits to your website, you’ve finally managed to win the trust of your customers, and they ordered something in your webshop. As most of you might already know, it costs more time and money to get a new customer than to keeping him or her. So, now it’s important to make sure this new customer is happy about spending money with you and that he or she stays a happy customer.
By using marketing automation with your email campaigns, you could save yourself lots of time and money. But when done properly it might even make you more money when you start using loyalty campaigns. Let’s dive into five tips to keep your customers, the happiest customers in the world by using e-mail marketing.
Loyalty Tip #1 Reward your most loyal customers
Do you know what the average order size of your customers is? And who is the one spending more than average in your shop? These customers are the customers you would like to see coming back, making repeat orders. By rewarding them with an extra discount you can make sure that they will order again with you the next time they need to order. If they don’t come back after a given period, it might be a good idea to remind them on the extra discount that you gave them.
To be able to achieve this, you’ve got to make sure there is an integration between your webshop and the email marketing provider that you’re using. By having such a connection, you’re able to let information like orders be automatically updated in your email database. You can then make a selection of the people who ordered more than the average in your store. To save yourself a lot of time, try adding a dynamic date criterion in your selection. If you add “today” for example, you can automatically send an email to everyone who ordered more than average on that specific day. This will save sending out accidental duplicate emails to someone who spend more than the average yesterday.
Next step is making a second selection of the people who got a discount coupon “two months ago”, but haven’t used the coupon yet. You can send these people a reminder on the discount you gave and pinpointed your Unique Value Proposition. If you create this selection dynamic like the one with the more than average spenders on any given day, you can make sure that all these emails are sent automatically as well, saving you time.
Loyalty Tip #2 Discover the breaking of trends
Loyal customers are the best customers you could have for your business. These loyal customers are often the customers who will generate the most revenue for your business so you would like to keep them coming back to your business for as long as possible. But what if a customers all of a sudden doesn’t return anymore to your business? How can you recognise this in your data and how can you react to it?
It’s time to introduce the Regency, Frequency, Monetary Value Method (RFM-method).Every time someone places an order, you will give that customer a point. You could, for example, connect this to the order value of the actual order. This way you’re giving a person who’s ordering more than the average order size more points for that particular order. Next up is the creation of the selection. You select a minimum points value and people whose points did not increase in let’s say the last six months.
Timely and relevant communication after the first order. – Visual by copernica
Next, up there are two things you could do. First off, you could send these people a personal discount email. If people don’t react to this email (look into the email statistics if they opened the email and if they clicked the link going back to your website), then it’s time to give them some more personal attention.
If they did not react to the first email, you could then create an export of these people with their contact details. You could try phoning them to see how they’re doing and if you could do something special for them to let them come back to your shop.
Loyalty Tip #3 Make your content more relevant
By looking into the buying and clicking behaviour of your customers, you can find out about their interests. If you have an online clothing shop for example, and you’re noticing that a particular customer is only ordering male clothing, then you could be pretty sure that this customer is a male. Would you then send him emails containing female clothing?
Have a good look at the different product categories that you’re having in your e-commerce shop and have your email automatically adapt to the interests of the recipient.
You could also create specific campaigns. Do you’ve got some extra stock in your store with female shoes of size 8? Then sent a specialised campaign to the persons who’ve ordered female shoe size eight before.
Loyalty Tip #4 Send a birthday campaign
Sending of a birthday campaign via email is something most companies are already doing. But what if you would take it up a notch and send your loyal customers a card via normal mail?
Some software gives you the opportunity to create personalised PDF software. If you design a birthday card, you could use that software to automatically fill in certain fields using a handwritten font for example.
If you create a selection in your customer database of like we did at number two to get your loyal customers and add an extra criterion of everybody who is having their birthday in the coming week you could easily automatically create an ordinary birthday card for your most loyal customers and have it send to them.
Loyalty Tip #5 Turn almost loyal customers into loyal customers
The last item on our list is all about making your almost loyal customers even more loyal and do some up-selling in your shop at the same time.
Our first tip talked about finding your most loyal customers, let’s say for example everyone who has an order size of 75 dollars or more in your shop. You could reward them with a 20% discount on their next purchase. But what if someone only ordered for 60 dollars? You could send them an email stating that if they spent another 15 dollars in your shop, it would earn them a discount of 20% on their next return visit.
These are just five tips you could start using in your e-commerce shop right now to turn your customers into more loyal customers and keep them happy and returning to your store for a long time. Which tips can you still come up with yourself? Or are you already using in your business to achieve this goal? Let us know in the comments!
