What is Customer Retention and How to Use it in Your Email Marketing?
The easiest way to grow your customers is not to lose them.
While acquiring new leads is often the top priority for many marketing teams, the average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually simply by failing to attend to customer relationships. Email can be the cornerstone of any successful retention marketing strategy. But before diving your head into it and trying out every last retention email campaign tactic, let us first find out what it is in general and how you can integrate retention marketing efforts into your email marketing program today.
What is Retention Marketing?
Retention marketing encompasses the activities and strategies centered around maintaining and nurturing your leads as they become customers, as well as ensuring that they remain happy customers. It is important to remember that customer retention begins with the first contact a customer has with your company and continues throughout the entire lifetime of the relationship.
What are the Benefits?
While most companies traditionally spend more money on customer acquisition because they view it as a quick and effective way of increasing revenue, customer retention often is faster and, on average, costs up to seven times less than customer acquisition. Selling to customers with whom you already have a relationship is often a more effective way of growing revenue.
What retention marketing tactics can you use in your email program?
- A warm welcome email with additional resources or tips that help your recipient use your service.
- Exclusive offers and rewards for loyal and consistent users or customers.
- Regular useful/ educational content
- Seasonal promo campaigns
- Re-activation email for inactive users and much more.
The proof of efficiency retention marketing is in the numbers: according to Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to an increase in profits of 25% – 95%, and the likelihood of converting an existing customer into a repeat customer is 60% – 70%, while the probability of converting a new lead is 5% – 20%, at best.
