Leveraging email marketing to increase customer LTV

Multiple studies in recent years, including one conducted by the Harvard Business Review, have confirmed that retaining a customer is far more cost-effective than acquiring a new one. These studies assert that it is five to 25 times cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is for a brand to acquire a new one. With that intel in hand, how can brands tighten their marketing funnels to ensure that they are retaining customers and encouraging future spending at every turn? We posed that very question to a panel of experts during our latest webinar.

Leveraging email marketing to increase customer LTV

Speakers:

• Chloe Fisher, Director of Agency Partnerships, Clyde

• Ashley Ismailovski, CRO Operations Manager, SmartSites

• Matt Schultheiss, Senior Product Manager, Clyde

Our panel spoke directly to the idea of strengthening your ownership funnel while providing concrete examples of how brands are using post-purchase email campaigns to drive results in the market today. For full access to the webinar, including details on the Clyde+Klaviyo integration, click here.

Three Takeaways

1. Email marketing impacts every aspect of the customer lifecycle

Brands invest time, money, and resources into acquiring potential customers. This acquisition phase, as it relates to email marketing, often boils down to convincing a potential customer to subscribe or opt-in to a newsletter or email series. From there, brands look to build trust with those customers, nudging them closer and closer to a transaction. This conversion phase is often cited as a key indicator of a healthy, thriving ecommerce business. But these two pillars alone only tell half the story.

“What I see most often is the brands will start and stop with the first conversion. What they are neglecting here is everything that happens post-purchase. After you make a sale, you not only have the opportunity to leverage a positive experience into a 5-star review online, but you gain the ability to retain your hard-earned customers and convert them again.” - Ashley Ismailovski, CRO Operations Manager at SmartSites

The post-purchase experience is critical for a variety of reasons. It’s within this phase that email marketing can develop cross-selling opportunities, generate reviews, and encourage post-purchase contract sales. This extends further to the retention phase in which brands generate customer loyalty, drive repeat purchases, and create brand ambassadors. The brands that fully understand how email marketing drives each segment of the customer lifecycle, are the ones positioned to succeed in the marketplace. 

2. Creating brand ambassadors is crucial

There are different flavors of paid brand ambassadors including influencers, experts, and affiliates. There’s also a fourth variety: customer ambassadors. These customers generate content about a brand via their personal social media accounts without being directly paid. They generate what is known as “social proof,” which in turn encourages others to buy products. This is critical because when consumers shop, they often look for reviews, recommendations, and ways that others have used a product to help guide their buying decisions.

“Even with a brand where it might be difficult to drive repeat purchases, you have customers who end up generating new leads for your brand just by sharing their positive experiences, or referring someone they know.” - Ashley Ismailovski, CRO Operations Manager at SmartSites

Consumers who generate this social proof become brand ambassadors and the brands themselves can encourage this behavior by offering things like priority customer service, early-access to new products, or gifts on a regular basis. The vehicle to kickstart this process is a post-purchase email campaign, in which brands can encourage enthusiastic customers to share their experiences on social media. Calls to action like social media buttons and hyperlinks make it seamless for a happy customer to become a brand ambassador in just a few keystrokes. 

3. Debunking “batch and blast” misconceptions

An oversimplification in the world of digital marketing is the belief that it is always better to have more eyeballs on a message than fewer. Sending emails that are irrelevant to a large portion of your email list is only encouraging recipients to view your outreach, and your brand by extension, as spam. This increases the likelihood that customers will ignore your outreach efforts in the future. Practiced consistently, this can be toxic to your entire marketing operation. 

The counterbalance to the “batch and blast” approach is to create detailed customer segments based on previous behavior. Open rates, click-through rates, purchase history and other trackable customer behaviors within email campaigns can help brands drive more relevant, customized, and ultimately effective content. Welcome series for new customers, incentivized loyalty/referrals programs for existing customers and personalized cross-sell promotions based upon previous behavior are just a few best practices that brands can tap into via their email campaigns. 

Ready to build an effective email marketing strategy?

As an early adopting agency partner, SmartSites & Clyde have formed a mutually beneficial partnership that greatly benefits our clients. What’s really unique about an agency’s relationship with a tech partner is that not only are our clients given a great tool to work with, but the agency has the capabilities to offer the services needed to drive marketing strategies around a platform like Clyde. So, in the case of email marketing,SmartSites’ clients can depend on them not only for their day-to-day activities (i.e. campaigns, automations, and list growth integrations), but also to optimize how platforms like Clyde are integrated into their marketing plan to generate better results.Feel free to contact a CRO specialist at SmartSites today !