Every customers’ journey is different, from finding your brand all the way through to becoming a lifetime customer. The best way to market your brand, through any channel, is by treating your customers more like people rather than thinking of them as a transaction. This will help build trust with your brand and is key to moving them along each stage of the journey. Here’s how you can personalize your emails to win over your subscribers’ hearts at every step of the customer journey.
Acquisition
In the acquisition process, it’s important to gather data, such as date of birth, location, and other relevant fields, so you can start personalizing your communications straight away. This is also when you can start segmenting your audience depending on what you learn about them, giving you the power to make their experiences with your brand more relevant and valuable.
The first and most simple way to do this is by sending out customized welcome or onboarding emails. You can introduce them to your brand and also highlight how your product or services can specifically benefit them. For example, if they have signed up for a newsletter for your gardening advice, you can highlight the special landscaping deals currently on offer in their area. To make this process easier for you, set up your welcome emails to be sent automatically when a customer signs up for your newsletters.
If you want to learn more about creating a seamless onboarding experience for your customers read our blog: 5 Ways to Boost Customer Loyalty With a Seamless Onboarding Experience.
Consideration
When someone is considering your products or services, providing a more personalized experience will help you stand out against your competitors. In fact, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
If you have an eCommerce store, you can capture the potential customers that have placed items into their cart but haven’t made a purchase. These people clearly have high intent but may need an extra push to commit to making a purchase. You can help nurture your leads down the sales funnel by including customer reviews, testimonials, case studies, and special offers in your emails.
Abandoned cart emails are simple to set up when you integrate your eCommerce platform with your email marketing system. The Vision6 and Shopify integration gives you the power to automate your abandoned cart journeys so you can save time and sell more.
Decision
Your job isn’t over as soon as a customer makes a purchase from you. Continuing to offer value and relevance to your customers will create a positive purchase experience. This, in turn, builds loyalty with your brand. In fact, 86% of the customers with great purchase experiences will likely buy from the same company again.
You can customize your communications throughout the purchase process with things like order notification emails, service information and how-to emails, and even thank you notes. Personal touches in these communications let them know they are valued and aren’t just a number to you once they hand their money over.
Retention
Retention is incredibly important for increasing profits, particularly for B2B businesses. Even a 5% boost in customer retention can increase profits by up to 95%.
Check-in with your customers, send out feedback or survey emails, acknowledge important days for them such as birthdays. Taking simple steps that demonstrate an interest in your customers will go a long way in building life-long loyalty.
There are plenty of other ways to support customer retention: you could share valuable content with them, offer them exclusive access to promotions, send rewards like VIP perks, or invite them to upcoming events. Invite subscribers into your store based on their location or tailor product recommendations to their past behaviour. This is great for keeping customers engaged with your brand and also encouraging repeat purchases.
Re-engagement
Sometimes your customers make one purchase and then disappear, or show engagement initially but then slowly lose interest in you. Instead of disregarding them, it’s useful to segment them into their own list and start a re-engagement campaign.
Your re-engagement campaign can be as complex or simple as you like, but you should make sure you’re using highly relevant and personalized messaging. Talk to their pain points, suggest new products or services that could benefit them, offer them discounts, or ask them what they would like to see from you. It’s important to remind unengaged customers how important they are to your business.
You can also compliment your direct email marketing with Facebook retargeting. By integrating Facebook Business with your Vision6 account you can increase your reach by targeting your subscribers across social and google display networks.
Conclusion
Every stage is valuable in the customer journey and every stage presents opportunities to personalize and target your email content. Spending some time to develop this content and set up automation workflows will take the stress out of getting the right information to your customers at the right time.
If you’re looking to supercharge every stage of the customer journey with powerful email marketing campaigns, book a free demo or a personalized training session with one of our onboarding specialists today!
