Do you struggle to retain your customers and keep them coming back? You could be missing one or more critical pieces of an effective customer retention email campaign. In this post, we’ll cover 5 types of emails to send to your customers that will keep them coming back for more. The five emails below are critical to any email marketing campaign for ensuring that your customers keep coming back. These emails can be used as a part of an effective email autoresponder series so that you can put the entire customer retention process on autopilot.

Onboarding Emails

Onboarding might not be the first thing you think of regarding getting customers coming back for more. However, brand new customers are the warmest: they are the most likely to return because your brand and their purchase are still fresh on their minds. Also, if customers don’t use the product they purchased, then they won’t come back for more later. Getting them to use your product right away is a critical piece of the puzzle that you can’t ignore, or you’ll risk losing these customers.

One way to ensure that your new customers complete the onboarding process is by sending an email 48 hours after sign-up, encouraging them to complete their profile or to take the first step in using your product. You should also be using onboarding emails to warm up new leads and encouraging them to make their first purchase. For instance, if you offered a coupon as an incentive for a prospect to join your email list, make a reminder email a part of your onboarding process.

Activity Emails

Everyone is comfortable with activity emails, and these tend to me the emails that users are the happiest to receive. These contain notifications, updates, or summaries of the user’s activity. Since users are so comfortable with these emails, they are perfect for increasing engagement. In fact, research shows that activity emails are opened eight times more often than promotional emails. In other words, if you aren’t sending out transactional emails, you’re missing out on an opportunity to reach subscribers.

Cross Sells & Up Sells

Remember how customers who just bought are the most likely to buy again? Use this to your advantage by giving customers who recently purchased the opportunity to buy a related product (a cross sell) or a higher-end product (an up sell).

VIP Offers

Customers love to feel special. If you encouraged customers to sign up for your email list with the promise that you would offer them special perks and “VIP” content, then following up on that guarantee is a must. One of the best ways to do this is to present them with the occasional “exclusive subscriber offer.” There’s unlimited potential for exclusive content… you just have to get creative! You can offer discounts, secret products, free samples, courses, webinars, podcasts, and more.

Whatever you do, be strategic about how you permit users to get access to these offers: you want them to be truly exclusive to your customers and subscribers. Another great way to reward your subscribers and keep them engaged with your brand is by offering an exclusive giveaway.

If you do a giveaway, just make sure you don’t fall into the trap of offering something that anyone would want. If your prize is too generic, you will get low-quality leads.

Surveys

Survey emails are extremely useful for getting customers to come back, and for getting new customers as well, because they help you to improve the product itself. You can send surveys to customers who buy, or leads who didn’t buy your product. You can even send surveys to your general audience to segment them based on their needs, so that you can create and tailor your products specifically to each of your segments.

An effective customer retention strategy includes an email marketing campaign that continuously engages customers all along their journey with your brand. If you miss any one of these critical components, you could be losing customers to another brand. However, if you include all these types of emails you could really knock their socks off and obtain loyal customers for life.

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