Our clients often tell us how hard it is to keep up with the latest digital marketing tools. Our response is often an effort to explain how these tools allow for more freedom and flexibility for busy business owners who wear many hats (and, let’s be honest, who doesn’t?).
In order for your emails to be relevant and effective, you’ll need to start with an understanding of where your customers are in the sales cycle. Understanding how people go from hearing about your brand to making a purchase gives you the power to provide the right information to customers at the right time.
An awareness of where customers are falling in the sales cycle informs the message they need to hear from you. The good news is there are ways to streamline the process. Instead of creating a one-off campaign every time you need to introduce new shoppers to your brand, or to re-engage past customers, you can set up an email automation series and can worry less about customers slipping through the cracks.
To do so requires effort and strategic planning up front. To ensure that your email series support your overall goals, you’ll want to start by estimating the lifetime value of your customers. A customer’s lifetime value (CLV) is their potential net profit during the time they’ve been engaged with your brand. By measuring the net profit that you’ll take in over the course of your entire relationship with a customer, you’ll be able to narrow down exactly how valuable they are to your business. After you know your CLV, you can use this number to budget how much you’ll want to invest into email automation.
If you are hoping to increase the profitability to your organization, a great place to start is by focusing on increasing your CLV. So how do you do that? Encourage your existing customers to spend more. Below are three examples of email automation series that can be set up to support an increase in your CLV, depending upon the segment in the sales cycle you’re targeting.
WELCOME EMAIL SERIES
Share appreciation when a customer joins your list, and make them immediately glad they did.
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Welcome them to the family and let them know they made it on your list.
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Offer an incentive.
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Set the expectation and let them know how often they will receive emails from you.
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Remind them how they can connect with you between emails (social channel links, visit your location, call or email directly, etc).
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Then, offer value. Educate your audience. Let your audience know what you do, why you do it, how you do it, why you love it, how it helps them, etc. The idea is to take one idea and see where it leads while building a relationship with your audience.
FOLLOW UP ON PURCHASES
We all know it is more expensive to find new customers than to keep the customers we have, not to mention that repeat customers spend more per transaction than new customers.
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Similar to the welcome email, immediately send a follow up email for all first time purchases with a genuine thank you that also sets the expectation for what steps come next. Make them feel awesome for doing business with you.
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Three days later, send an email to ask them “is everything ok?” Do not make them fill out a contact form, but rather welcome feedback on their experience by replying directly to your email.
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Another three days later, request a review.
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Four days later, offer a time-sensitive promotion, such as a repeat purchase or a complimentary product that goes with their order.
WE MISS YOU SERIES
Over time, your subscribers will gradually tune out your email. Create a campaign to win them back by designing a series of emails to reactivate your lost leads.
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Begin with a casual reminder that it’s been a while.
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Follow up an amazing offer.
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Again, still in a casual and polite way, let them know you will unsubscribe them soon if you don’t hear back from them.
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Unsubscribe them nicely. There is no reason to keep sending emails to an inactive user. Your subscribers will respect this move, and keeping your email distribution lists clean will improve your deliverability score, since you’ll no longer be emailing people who don’t respond to your emails.