Retention is not simply a strategy to apply only when the “churn rate” rises to the danger zone, but an activity that must be carried out on an ongoing basis – here are seven email campaigns you can use to help you perceived as useful and by the customer.
Every company has revolving doors: the number of customers acquired always corresponds (naturally) to the number of customers who leave.
This last fact has a very specific name – it’s called the cancellation rate, and it’s no less important than the number of new customers in terms of ROI or billing.
We are dedicating today’s blog post to the Churn Rate, putting some tactics to counter it on the table via email channels. Let’s start with some basic notions.
What is the Churn Rate or cancellation fee?
Refers to the customer churn / churn rate. This is a certain percentage that compares customers who have stopped a service with those who have chosen and confirmed it.
By understanding that it is impossible for this percentage to be zero, as a certain number of churn is natural, the churn rate helps us understand the dynamics between new entries and exits so that a company can always have the relationship under control.
All you need is a simple formula to calculate the churn / churn rate – take the total number of lost customers in a period of time and divide by the total number of customers your business has.
Customers at the beginning of the month – Customers at the end of the month) / Customers at the beginning of the month
Countering the churn rate: retention activity
Defining retention as loyalty may be wrong, but it explains the concept quite well.
We can say that the abandonment / cancellation rate is inversely proportional to the retention rate, or the confirmation of your service by those who have already chosen it.
Customer retention is the set of activities implemented by a company to retain its customers over time, which minimizes defections. In the broadest and most general sense, it indicates the maintenance of continuous long-term relationships of exchange with customers.
The effectiveness of a sales strategy targeting an acquired customer is 60-70%, while the effectiveness of a strategy targeting a new customer is 5-20% (source: Invesp Consulting).
In pursuing the retention goal, a company can use different techniques and tools. In this blog post, we will focus on one channel in particular that you can use to enforce a very effective retention activity: email marketing.
7 email marketing retention tactics
Through retention email marketing, companies can attract their customers and strengthen their relationship with the brand, offering utility and added value.
Let’s look at some retention techniques applied to email marketing.
Create and submit useful content
How can you convince the customer of the quality of your product / service and induce them to stay with you? The sine qua non condition is that they know how to take advantage of the full potential of the product available to them.
The more customers who know and understand the product, the more they will appreciate the features, find them useful, and are willing to renew their loyalty accordingly.
Invite clients to webinars and courses
Especially for companies operating in the field of software, webinars, online courses or in the classroom are fundamental tools that you can use to increase customer engagement, offer useful things, and cultivate brand identity.
In addition to providing useful information about the product, the goal is to increase the perception of the company as reliable and available to meet the needs of customers.
Send recap emails about customer activity
Let customers know how they are using the product / service and what results they are getting – this is a great way to make them sit by your side, improving their perception of usefulness and reliability. .
This is a very interesting option that consists of sending customers an email that summarizes some information about their use of the product / service. Each brand can provide numbers and information based on its business model, as long as they are relevant to the recipient.
Design a product newsletter
From a customer focus, we move more towards a product focus – one option to pursue is a more editorial newsletter that you can use to communicate hot and important news from the press to customers (if they missed it), anything that comes up in the near future and any other kind of useful or possibly entertaining information.
These are the macro-themes around which our product bulletin could be detailed on a quarterly basis:
- What’s new
- Whats Next
- Ongoing projects
- Upcoming events
- Reading tips
Take advantage of the potential of important emails
Perhaps the name may mean nothing to you, but Milestones are those emails that celebrate some kind of result, a recurring event, or an “anniversary” between the customer and the company. This is another precious opportunity that helps the user to feel at their side.
Engage inactive customers
Since a certain churn / cancellation rate is natural, so is a certain inactivity rate – this means that as days and weeks go by, some customers stop interacting with and using the service or product. In many cases, inactivity is the precursor to abandonment.
Therefore, it becomes essential to reactivate these inactive customers. How? With targeted emails that communicate closeness and know how to trigger an action on the part of the customer, with useful content or the request to contact the company to solve any problem that prevents its use.
To support retention: onboarding, new launches, cross-sell and upsell
Marketing objectives are not always parallel but often intersect, and in this sense we have included various activities as final techniques: induction, pitches, cross-sell, and upsell. While everyone performs different tasks, they also contribute to the retention goal.
Cross-sell and upsell work the same way: both are techniques that will make the customer understand that the company’s solutions go far beyond what they imagine.
In summary
As you may have understood, retention means using specific strategies that can highlight the good choices made by the customer.
With this post, we wanted to explain how retention activities are not simple ancillary strategies that will be implemented only when the turnover rate increases to the danger zone; on the contrary, they are activities to be carried out constantly.
Our advice is to develop a retention email marketing strategy, defining a set of campaigns and then verifying their effectiveness. And don’t forget to clean your list here! that will help you on your bounce rate