Do you want to know the biggest myth surrounding business growth? Most people think it’s all about “acquiring more leads and customers”, whereas in fact, it’s primarily about optimizing customer retention, or more specifically customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Now, don’t get me wrong, of course acquiring more leads and initial conversions is important. It’s just that when you compare average businesses to fast-growing companies, the main difference is that the latter excel at maximizing per-customer profit. It’s about putting equal focus on retention, and not getting obsessed with just acquisition alone.
Why retention is the biggest secret to profit and growth
“Customer retention” is about a lot more than simply “keeping people around”. If that is all you did, the benefits wouldn’t be all that great. There is a bit more to this secret.
When business owners talk about “customer retention”, they mean an entire category of things that boils down to “Maximize the amount of profit per-customer or per-lead”.
When we talk about brand loyalty, we don’t just mean “they’ll buy from you instead of your competitors”. We also mean that they will refer leads and customers to your business and trust you when you promote other products and services. All of these are ways of obtaining additional profit that can be attributed back to that one original customer.
Understanding the role that email plays
If you know anything about email, then you probably know that it holds the lead as the channel with the highest return on investment. It has held that title as an undisputed champion since the very beginning, and it’s not going to lose that title anytime soon.
But do you want to know why that is? What is the secret? Why does email excel at producing profits to such an astonishing level? Well, it has to do with the very nature of email which produces a sense of familiarity and over-time builds a sense of a relationship, leading to loyalty toward the brand.
In other words, even if someone did nothing else except consistently email their customers with a newsletter, they would already do a pretty good job at increasing their customer retention. Email is just that good as a channel.
However, obviously, I am going to share more specifics with you in this guide to make sure that you can really maximize things and leverage email to its fullest potential and supercharge your per-customer and per-lead profits. That is what the rest of this guide is all about.
Get a friend on your side
Wouldn’t it be great if there was someone that wanted to see your business grow as fast as it can and make it easier to implement all of these strategies?
That is where Emercury comes in. Unlike other producers of marketing solutions, we do not see the people who use Emercury as just “software users”. We see each business on Emercury as a “partnered business” of sorts. That means we want to see your business grow through the leveraging of email. The software is just the tool we use to help you achieve your goals.
This is why we have a unique pricing structure not seen anywhere else. You will notice that almost all features are available on all tiers. We want to give you all the tools you need to grow. The difference between the tiers is mostly in the amount of service that you get, and not the amount of “toy features” as with other platforms.
If you want to get a sense for this kind of hands-on-service, you can book a demo while I still have time for those. We can discuss how your business can grow faster leveraging strategies like these and I can show you how to apply them on Emercury.
Alternatively, or in addition to that, be sure to grab a “forever-free” account while we still have the registrations open. We could pull it at any moment. It is literally the most generous free plan out there. If you get it now, you keep it for well, forever.
Share valuable content
Nothing builds loyalty like giving value, and fortunately with email it is supremely easy and almost cost-free to do so.
Your only cost to give this value is the cost of producing the content itself, however this is a one-time cost. Sharing this content with people through email is virtually free. It is almost like having an ability to give gifts to your customers at no cost to your business.
Establish a consistent rhythm to build trust
The major mistake I see with businesses is that they fail to set a pattern of consistency when communicating with their customers and leads. They might have a month of bombarding their customers with a gazillion emails, and then go silent for months and not send a single email.
This is a bad practice for many reasons I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say that you really need to commit to consistent communication. It doesn’t matter what the frequency is. If the only way to be consistent is to commit to a monthly newsletter, that’s fine.
You can always send additional promotions on top of the one pillar of consistency. But you do need to set that one pillar which serves to build a sense of trust with your customers and leads.
Ask for feedback
Nothing builds trust and loyalty like a feeling that you matter to someone. This is why you will see all the best companies and marketers sending you emails with requests for feedback or filling out surveys. And sometimes they might even offer a prize for doing the survey or giving the feedback.
Aside from getting lots of great data to guide your business, asking for feedback serves this other, perhaps even more important role. It shows people that you care about them, their opinion, and want to steer your brand in the right direction, as defined by them and their opinions.
Share social proof and feedback that you have received
If you have studied marketing at all, you will know that social proof does wonders for conversions. What isn’t often mentioned though, is that the benefits of social proof do not stop after the first sale.
In fact, if you want to build people’s trust and loyalty further, you want to continue finding ways to share what other customers think about your brand. It’s just like when during the first sale the social proof makes people go “hmmm, other people just like me have bought this product’. It can also make people go “hmmm, other customers have kept investing in and trusting this brand, buying from them for years and investing in their entire catalog”.
Encourage joining ‘your community’
Getting regular emails where you share other customers’ experiences and feedback already does a solid job of making people feel like they’re part of a community. You want people to think of the customers for your brand as “a community of loyal fans”.
However, if you have social media presence, you can insert links to your social profiles in all of your emails. That will encourage people to follow you on your different profiles and encourage that sense of belonging to the “community of fans” for your brand.
And then, depending on your business model, you might even start actual communities, whether this is an online group, physical meetups or other sorts of events where fans can come together. Obviously, you would want to promote those inside of your emails in a similar fashion to the social media.
Employ a loyalty or referral program
The reason I’m saying “or” is because this will depend on your business model. Not all business models lend themselves to a loyalty program, but almost any business can and should have a referral program.
If you can do both, that’s great, but at least consider developing a referral program. It really helps get people invested in your brand, and then bring you new customers at the same time. That is a pretty great deal if you ask me.
Now, in terms of specifics, the kind of loyalty or referral program you can implement will again depend on your business model. However, the important thing is that you want to weave in these programs throughout your emails. You want to use every excuse to promote them. This is in addition to having dedicated emails that promote your programs more directly.
Utilize upsells and cross-sells
You might know that utilizing upsells and cross-sells is one of the best ways to get more sales out of a customer. What you might not realize is that it can also be a great way of building brand loyalty.
It’s all about how you frame it. You’re not doing it from a sense of begging people to “please spend more money”. You should be approaching upsells and cross sells from the standpoint of personalizing their customer journey.
And what do I mean by this? If you do a good job of tracking the customer journey for your subscribers, you should have enough data points to automatically recommend the right upgrade or additional product when they need it. This increases the odds that they will buy those additional products or upgrades.
And to top it off, it will lead to a bigger sense of trusting your brand to be their one-stop shop for everything they, or their business needs. If you want to learn more about personalizing the customer journey, check out our guide on utilizing personalized email.
Organize cross-brand promotions
This is similar to the previous point because most people associate it with just making more money. And yes, when you do cross-promotions with other brands, you both make more money off of each other’s subscriber base.
However, the other benefit is similar to doing upsells and cross-selling of your own products. It builds trust with customers that you can be their one-stop shop for the best recommendations to meet their needs. If you don’t offer a product, you’ll recommend the best product from another trusted brand, right when they need it.
Leverage win-back campaigns
It is a fact-of-life: no matter how well you apply the rest of the strategies in this guide, some people will just fall off the wagon. They will start losing interest in what you offer and stop opening your emails or engaging with your brand.
The good news is that this is often temporary. If you’ve applied the rest of the strategies, you can be assured that people aren’t going inactive due to switching to a competitor.
Most often it is that they’re no longer in the market for what you’re selling in general. Sometimes they’ve moved on and are unlikely to need these kinds of services or products in their life or business. Most of the time it is just temporary because their priorities have shifted.
When the reason is the latter, you can often win them back by doing re-engagement and winback campaigns. To learn more about that, see our super popular guide on creating a killer re-engagement strategy.
Don’t Hesitate To Ask For Help
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to know the best ways to leverage email to boost retention and profit-per-customer in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about implementing things. Then, we can look at how you can leverage Emercury to do all of this.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Be warned, we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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