With online competition becoming more fierce, building relationships with your customers isn’t only meaningful—it’s essential. Along with buying your products or services, they’re actually investing in your brand.
While many marketing strategies help build relationships, email is the most effective and cost-efficient method of digital marketing to capitalize on brand loyalty. Once you build credibility and demonstrate that you understand your customer’s needs, those customers will translate into higher conversion rates, customer referrals, and social proof.
So how you can build relationships with email? Follow along to learn how email is the key to brand loyalty.
What are customer relationships?
Building customer relationships is a process in which marketing (and support) strategies create connections, loyalty, and company value. By utilizing client-focused strategies, you can form long-term relationships that streamline the company’s overall sales line.
Collecting valuable customer feedback and understanding what motivates purchases allows you to send meaningful content. You can then send messages that provide value to build relationships.
How to use email to build customer relationships
With countless marketing platforms and technologies available, what should you really invest in? The truth is that email marketing is still the highest generating channel and even beats social by 40x for customer acquisition.
Even though email marketing still reigns as king, you have to fight for customers to actually read your email. Customers receive hundreds of emails every day, and, if you want to build relationships using email, you need to ensure every message provides value and purpose. Otherwise, you run the risk of being ignored.
Source: Statista
Here are some tips to ensure you build loyalty with your customers.
Targeted personalization
What are your customers interested in? Does their geographic location matter? These are essential questions you need to ask yourself in order to personalize your content to your customer specifically. You can do this by segmenting your distribution lists, utilizing automation features, and tailoring your messaging.
Discounts and incentives
Customers often open emails with subject lines offering a discount or exclusive deal. While customers might be loyal to your product, they’ll appreciate you even more when they get to save a little money as well.
Source: Really Good Emails
Visually appealing and valuable content
After a customer opens your email, you’ve only won half the battle. You want them to take action with your CTA and, oftentimes, an artistic design and killer content will keep subscribers engaged. Consider mobile optimization, image quality, scannability, and content quality.
Consist cadence
By keeping a consistent schedule, you’re able to stay in the forefront of your customers’ minds. If you only send one email a quarter, there’s a chance your customers will forget about you and move on to a competitor. Create a content calendar to stay organized and set up automated triggers to ensure your emails are sent in a consistent, reliable manner.
Feedback
Customer feedback is incredibly important to determine how your customers feel about your company and products. You can use feedback to help choose what type of content to send, which can point your customer’s journey toward a loyal relationship.
How to measure customer relationships with email
Measuring the success of your emails will help decipher how well you’re building relationships with email. Don’t just look at individual campaigns—measure the engagement of your campaigns over time to see if you’re building better brand affinity.
If you have a 2% average click-through rate currently, see if you can get it up to 3% in a few months. This means your subscribers have deemed your messages to be more appealing to them.
Does it really matter?
Building customer relationships is a critical aspect of retaining business and creating loyalty. If you don’t receive repeat business, you’re missing out on possible referrals and additional sales. Utilizing email is undoubtedly the best way to start building these relationships, as it can drive a 760% increase in revenue.
What now?
Now that you understand the importance of building relationships with email, it’s time to start developing your own customer journey. These can be automated and are the best way to ensure that you continuously work toward that goal.