Ways to optimize your loyalty nurture emails

If there’s one thing every company wants, it’s a legion of happy customers. You know the type; customers who buy from you multiple times, customers who tell their friends, customers who forward your emails, and tell people to subscribe.

Those are the dream customers.

If you’re worried, you can’t find these unicorns hiding out somewhere, remember this: you can create them.

Focusing on providing an excellent customer experience can go a long way to turning someone from a one time buyer to a repeat customer.

One way to help provide this higher level of experience is by nurturing your customers through your loyalty email campaigns.

Here’s how to do it.

Welcome them to the family

Let’s say you run a retail shop. A potential new customer comes in, and you just….ignore them. No hello. No how’s it going? No can I help you with anything?

Chances are, your potential customer might walk out and never come back.

Now when someone signs up to your loyalty campaign, and you don’t send them a welcome email, it’s the same.

The crazy thing is, tons of brands do this exact thing. They collect all those customer emails and then don’t ever engage with their loyalty program members again.

Here’s a really easy place for you to stand out. Create a compelling welcome email that also serves as an explainer. Let them know how your loyalty program works, how they can earn points or rewards, and what they can expect from you.

Keeping open lines of communication is critical when it comes to nurturing your customers. They’ve gone out of their way to give you their email and sign up for your program, don’t leave them hanging.

Keep them in the loop

Something else you want to do is stay in touch with your customers. What does that mean?

You have a couple of options here, all of which are great ways to keep nurturing your customers.

Start by keeping them up to date on exactly where they stand in terms of their points or rewards. An easy approach is to send out a monthly update email. You can include their total points, an overview of their last few purchases, and how far away they are from the next level or tier.

You can do a lot with a regular update email, including featuring some exclusive sales or deals on products they might have in their shopping cart or have browsed previously.

With these emails and a lot of nurturing emails, you want to focus on personalization—the more personalized information you can give to your customers, the better. If you’re worried about sending too many emails, don’t, customers are happy getting personalized emails.

To get as personalized as possible, use the data you have. Your loyalty program management system, eCommerce tools, CRM, and email service provider hold a treasure trove of information you can use to segment and personalize your customer emails. Use this data to send your customers personalized emails with real-time information.

Remind them you care

Surprise and delight, that’s a common phrase among marketers. Well, as much as you hear it tossed around, it is true—customers like getting cool (read: free) stuff from the brands they like.

And something you might not realize is that as much as customers like getting coupons and free shipping, they really love getting extra points, upgraded tiers, and access to VIP events.

Work on sprinkling these types of nurture emails in your loyalty campaigns. You don’t necessarily have to blast these out every month, but think about where to capitalize on a kind gesture that reminds your customer you’re thinking about them.

Birthdays and anniversary specials are a great place to start. You can also tap into that data you have to go even deeper. Think about segmenting out your very top program members and giving them VIP sales or early access to new product releases. Or, use your eCommerce tool to see when they might need to renew a service and send them a reminder email.

Stuff like that really does matter to your customers. Even though most of the world spends a lot of time shopping online, we don’t always want to be anonymous customers. We want to build loyalty to the brands that are loyal to us.

With a couple of well thought out loyalty nurture emails, your brand can be one of those companies that shows customers you care. And for that, you’ll get rewarded.