In digital marketing, email remains a stalwart for direct communication with customers. For marketers looking to retain and monetize an existing customer base, email can be an affordable, customizable mechanism for improving retention. This blog investigates eight inventive strategies where email drives customer loyalty with personalized messages that delight customers.
A Personal Touch from an Online Retailing Giant: Amazon
Have you ever received a "Just for You" email from Amazon? Using complex algorithms, Amazon crafts individualized product recommendations based on a customer's purchase history and browsing behavior. This personalized optimization encourages further purchasing and makes customers feel understood and valued, enhancing their loyalty to the brand (Ghelber, 2020).
Exclusive Perks and Prestige: Sephora's Beauty Insider Program
The way Sephora uses email to reinforce customer loyalty is unparalleled. Their Beauty Insider program members receive status upgrades, birthday gifts, and special access to deals—all communicated through personalized emails. These perks make members feel part of an exclusive community, building brand affinity and retention (About Beauty Insider Loyalty Program | Sephora, n.d.).
A Screen-Full of Interest: Netflix's Show Updates and Recommendations
Netflix's user engagement emails are a staple of its retention strategy. Emails entice subscribers to return to the platform with updates on shows they might enjoy, directly aligning content with their viewing behavior. These recommendations drive engagement and demonstrate a detailed understanding of each user's preferences, fostering loyalty (Io Digital Agency, 2024).
The Soundtrack of Your Life: Spotify's Curated Playlists
Understanding that music is a profoundly personal experience, Spotify offers curated playlists directly delivered to inboxes. Based on a user's taste and listening habits, these playlists function as personalized entertainment and offer a nudge to revisit the platform—providing a harmonious approach to customer retention through email (Anderson, 2024).
Step into the Customer Service Hall of Fame: Zappos' Follow-Up Emails
Zappos is renowned for its customer service, and email plays a significant role. After a customer interacts with Zappos' representatives, they receive a follow-up email ensuring all is well. This extra mile in customer care ensures a lasting positive impression is maintained even when things might not have gone perfectly (Sharpen Staff Writer, 2024).
Write into Success: Grammarly's Progress Reports
As a linguistic companion, Grammarly doesn't just fix language errors but also educates users with insights into their writing. Weekly emails with writing stats and personalized progress reports are educational and engaging. They instill a desire for improvement, measure how much the user uses Grammarly in their writing, and make users more likely to stay with the service (Reallygoodux & Keen.io, 2023).
Educate to Elevate: HubSpot's Helpful Content
HubSpot's educational content emails are an underappreciated gem. By consistently providing value through blog posts, whitepapers, and webinars, HubSpot nurtures customer relationships beyond its platform. This act of 'giving before expecting' is a powerful customer retention method that positions the brand as a source of knowledge (Storm, 2023).
A Trip Down Memory Lane: Google Photos
Google Photos is the default photo storage solution for Android phones. The Google Photo application stores photos in the cloud and then mines this database of photos to create collages of photos from the past. Facial recognition technology, timeline information, location data, and event-related information allow Google algorithms to organize the pictures into collages and, more recently, movies set to music. Google creates and shares these trips down memory lane via user notifications (Ben-Yair, 2021). Users can share the output by text or email or customize the output (e.g., to stop seeing photos of exes) using the app user settings. Recently, Google created a separate tab to store these "Memories" within its Google Photo application. Google added functionality to allow users to name, rename, and edit the Memories that Google created (Brinkmann, 2023).
Data Mining, Personalization, and Links to the 'Mother Ship'
Note that most of these examples rely on three critical elements. First is mining customer information and preferences to understand their needs. Second is personalizing the email or system notification relevant to those needs; third, the messaging provides links to bring the customer back to the website to enjoy or act upon custom offers and opportunities.
Summing up: Five "izes"
From special offers to customer education to excellent service follow-up to trips through your photo memories, retention messages engage, excite, and entwine your customers in the fabric of your brand. To deliver this experience, synthesize customer data, analyze your users' needs, personalize your messaging, product, or service to provide a value-added offering, and then publicize it to your community using customized email. To learn about other digital marketing technologies that you can use to improve customer retention, check out our blog article on Eight Digital Marketing Technologies.
References
About Beauty Insider Loyalty Program | Sephora. (n.d.). Sephora. https://www.sephora.com/beauty/loyalty-program
Anderson, A. (2024, January 24). Making Personalization the Center of Your Customer Retention Strategy like Spotify. Sharpen. https://sharpencx.com/spotify-customer-retention/
Ben-Yair, S. (2021, May 18). Your photos, your memories, your way. Google. https://blog.google/products/photos/new-memories-features-look-back/
Brinkmann, M. (2023, August 16). Your memories have a permanent place now in Google Photos. gHacks Technology News. https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/16/your-memories-have-a-permanent-place-now-in-toogle-photos/
Ghelber, A. (2020, November 24). Seven steps to achieve customer retention like Amazon. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2020/11/24/seven-steps-to-achieve-customer-retention-like-amazon/
Io Digital Agency. (2024). iO — blended agency with wide-ranging and in-depth expertise. https://www.iodigital.com/. Retrieved January 30, 2024, from https://www.iodigital.com/en/history/raak/how-netflix-defined-email-marketing-for-streaming-platforms
Lambert, S. (n.d.). This is Why HubSpot is the Best Content Marketing Platform. Retrieved January 30, 2024, from https://www.xcellimark.com/blog/this-is-why-hubspot-is-the-best-content-marketing-platform
Reallygoodux & Keen.io. (2023). Grammarly's re-engagement emails. GoodUX.appcues.com. https://goodux.appcues.com/blog/grammarly-engagement-emails
Staff Writer, S. (2024, January 3). The customer service strategies behind Zappos' success. Sharpen. https://sharpencx.com/zappos-customer-service/
Storm, A. (2023, September 9). Crafting Customer Retention Emails: The Complete Guide. Blog.Hubspot.com. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-retention-emails
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