Benefits of running an effective newsletter campaign to retain more customers

In reality this is a highly complex challenge because it needs constant attention to the behaviours of email customers and fluid segments where customers can move from segment to segment depending on the actions they take. Where there is the resource, this means using a centralised CRM tool that captures all customer information to enable the holy grail of ‘single customer view’.

This focuses on the structure you can build to manage your retention marketing campaigns. 

• Create a monthly newsletter to communicate news and developments:

• This is the relationship building tool of your retention program: revenue is a target but not the primary focus; the goal is to increase brand engagement amongst your opt-in customers and increase their understanding of what you do and how it benefits them

• Use features like dynamic content to reduce the campaign admin and need to create multiple campaigns.

• Showcase new products and services to raise awareness of changes ie: do you have a new yoga class or women's only clinic running on a specific day of the week or do you have some offer or discounts then let your customers know. 

• Promote your social media presence strongly and ask people to join you socially. Try to spread your presence across several platforms and control your presence on Hootsuite to make things easier

• Include interactive content that encourages people to take actions e.g. use polls to get customer feedback and then publish poll results in the next newsletter.  

• Showcase customer content to demonstrate that there is a community to get involved with. Here you can use your customer reviews or look at articles past clients have written about you in blogs or newspapers. With local search being so important it is better if you can showcase reviews that have been placed on your Google Local Page.

• Promote value-added content such as videos, blogs, white papers, articles etc.

• Include content that isn’t about your company but is relevant to what you do and would further establish you as ‘thought leaders’ or ‘interesting commentators’ e.g. a physiotherapy clinic using snippets of professional sportsperson using one of their products and allowing customers to share comments and bookmark socially about this

Create a separate sales cycle email campaign to drive conversion:

• This aims to give customers relevant promotions and offers to drive more appointments and more revenue 

• At the same time, you need to ensure that your email content is relevant to your email customers; this often means producing some bespoke content for email that isn’t being used in other marketing channel

• Learn from past campaigns to tailor promotions and offers based on what your customers respond best to

• Promote top rated customer reviews to encourage conversion.

• You can use segmented sign-up to get customers to subscribe to alerts services as well as general newsletter programs.

• You could also provide RSS feeds to enable people to get instant updates.

The key challenge in the Retention Program is to build a campaign schedule that is interesting and relevant to customers, not just about what you want to sell.

You will keep more email customers active if you engage with them and involve them in your email marketing. Don’t be afraid to use polls and surveys to find out what they like/dislike and use the feedback to evolve your marketing strategy. Again feel free to drop by and leave any comments.