Skip to content
We’ve already discussed content marketing — how it gives your brand personality and can form the foundation of a successful marketing strategy. But what about after you hook that first-time customer? Are you also devoting time and energy to retaining them once they’ve supported your brand?
For long-term growth, customer retention can be just as critical as acquisition. But where do you begin?
According to Oberlo, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. For a customer retention strategy, email marketing offers impressive results at far less cost than direct mail or even social media advertising.
Email marketing, just like any other channel, requires a little bit of finesse. There’s a method behind generating content that’s engaging and feels worthwhile to your audience. To build your reputation, rather than clutter inboxes, follow our 6 tips below for better email content.
Develop a Consistent Brand Voice Across Your Content
All of the content you create, from blogs to email copy, should maintain a consistent voice. That voice style could be fun and casual, or professional and formal. For example, here at Ardent, we like to keep it pretty chill. Like we’re just a couple of buds catching up over coffee.
If you’re not sure about your brand’s voice, we’re happy to evaluate your brand and make some suggestions for what your audience would respond best to. Keep this writing style in mind when writing everything — including email content.
Segment Your Email Subscriber List
- Interests
- Geographic location
- Purchase history
- Age
- Gender
There are many more ways you can segment your audience, but these are a few to think about. For example, if you were a clothing brand, you might want to segment your audience into men and women. That way you wouldn’t waste your time marketing products to the half of your audience that may not consider buying it.
Segmenting also tells your audience that you know and understand them. By only receiving product or service suggestions relevant to them, they feel as though your brand is more closely aligned with their specific needs.
Pull In The Best Moments from Social
Cross-media promotion should be standard across all your brand’s content. In every email, make sure to include calls to action for engaging with your brand on social media.
That doesn’t have to be a generic “be our friend” message. Get creative!
For one of our clients, Bison Coolers, we feature the customers themselves as the trusted brand ambassadors. At the end of their monthly consumer email, we include a section called “Herd Highlights” that highlights one audience member’s Instagram post with the caption #bisoncoolers. This not only shows consumers other Bison fans like themselves, but also encourages them to post pictures of the Bison products for a chance at being featured in an email. This sort of organic marketing is priceless. Or, actually, it’s not priceless: it’s free!
Use Email Marketing to Drive Traffic to Blogs and New Products
You wrote a great blog that was engaging, relevant, creative, and entertaining. Hooray! Did anyone see it though?
Creating content and not broadcasting it is like taking pictures of your food and never looking at them again. Ok. We do that…
Use timely, interesting, or educational pieces of content to generate clear lines of traffic from marketing emails to your website. It could be a blog post, video, podcast, or anything else you’ve created that your audience would benefit from seeing.
If you have a new product launching, use an email to generate buzz. Develop an attention-grabbing subject line and preview text. Use large product images to highlight the newest goods. In other words, think of email marketing as a way to answer “what’s new?”
Send Surveys to Learn More About Subscriber Preferences
Want to get to know your audience better? Try sending out a short survey to learn more about their preferences and the types of content they’re interested in seeing.
You can do this in a welcome email. The average open rate for a welcome email is 82%, so it’s a great idea to get a survey out there in your first email. You can use the survey to chart demographic data that you can use to segment your audience, like we mentioned above.
You can also ask them how often they’d like to receive emails. Giving your audience this option has been shown to reduce unsubscribe rates, since you’re giving your audience more control over the emails they receive.
Email Marketing Builds Brand Loyalty and Trust
For many small businesses, 1 email a week or less is sufficient for reaching your audience without overloading their inbox. But finding the sweet spot takes time — and a thorough understanding of your audience, industry, and your audience’s changing needs and preferences.
If you want more customers to stick around after that initial purchase, we highly recommend you start with the basics of email marketing. It’s the form of communication that most consumers expect and want to receive from you.
In fact, 73% of millennials prefer their communication from businesses to come via email.
But, we get it: making time to develop interesting, well-designed emails your audience will read takes time and energy you probably don’t have.
That’s where we come in. With experience in the leading marketing automation platforms and email marketing services, our Ardent digital marketing team can develop email marketing campaigns that keep your brand relevant for existing customers.
Contact us today to learn more about how our email marketing services can work for your brand.
