Building long-lasting customer relationships takes patience, consistency, and automation. Without that last one, it’s not possible for marketers to connect with customers as often as is necessary to maintain loyalty.
To help marketers elevate their email strategy, we’ve been exploring how to:
- Build a strong foundation for your email marketing strategy
- Boost metrics and drive engagement with your email content
- Maximize the beyond-the-click experience to drive conversions
In this final blog in our series, we’ll be looking at how automation can make your email strategy scalable.
Maximize engagement, loyalty, and trust: Set up essential automations
Make your email strategies scalable with automations. When building your automations, keep the entire customer journey in mind, engage with customers on special occasions, and don’t forget to show your appreciation.
Welcome emails make a great first impression with timely, compelling content, and a link to a preference center to set the stage for a positive relationship right from the start. When you onboard new customers, use automated emails to guide them through their journey, but humanize the automation with personalization. First, be their friend and welcome them. Second, be their mentor and educate them. And then, get them to partner with you and convert them.
Meet subscribers where they are and adjust your communication accordingly. For example, educate new subscribers, but don't bombard repeat customers. Win back lapsed customers with offers and scale back email marketing when necessary. Upsell your customers by letting them know how many loyalty points they have or by letting them in on a personalized offer. Celebrate loyalty and offer exclusivity. You can use the same method to re-engage your customers, but let them know they can also update their preferences because you’ve been noticing they haven’t been engaging as much lately.
How AI can help personalize the customer journey
Use AI to analyze subscriber data to help determine where customers are in their journey and what content will interest them, including what offers will lead to conversion. AI can make personalized product recommendations, identify relevant upsell or cross-sell opportunities, and spot early dissatisfaction to reduce unsubscribes.
Make the most of special occasions
Engage customers on special occasions. Pre-plan offers and touchpoints for birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. For holiday campaigns and events, tap into the festive excitement with exclusive, engaging content to drive your sales.
Say “thank you”
Make your emails personal with customized greetings, tailored content, and a touch of gratitude. Autoresponders enable you to have an always-on approach with thank you emails, reminders, welcome emails, and invitations for next steps following any customer interaction.
Thank your subscribers after they perform designated actions. Treat your VIP customers well, reward them with premium incentives, and always be helpful and offer support.
For more insights watch our on-demand webinar, Driving results through email: Maximizing deliverability and engagement or download our book with MarketingProfs, How to make email work even harder for you.
