Start building customer loyalty and lasting relationships through email marketing

What do you expect to get out of email marketing? Larger orders, and the highest return on investment of any social channel ($40 of revenue on $1 invested)? The most valuable return email marketing produces is in fact customer loyalty, and the word-of-mouth marketing it enables. Yet many email marketers overlook the loyalty their email builds. The reality is that once you grow loyalty and reach word of mouth, your marketing becomes self-propelling, because loyal customers promote the brand for you. Within that process, email marketing plays the role of growing loyalty and retaining customers.

Building the list:

Email is an effective acquisition channel, achieving a 7% growth rate — higher than the common social channels.

Generating opportunity:

Customers acquired by email carry a lifetime value up to 12% higher than those from other social channels.

You may have noticed, though, that organic and paid search bring in more qualified customers. So why choose email as the strategy? Because email marketing is the most cost-effective strategy available, and at the same time a two-way communication channel between you and your customers.

87% of eMarketers choose email marketing as their strategy

Generating revenue from search marketing takes enormous effort and investment. The most expensive cost per click runs as high as HKD430, while organic search consumes large amounts of time and manpower on content management. Climbing the search rankings means aligning your pages, your blog and even your social media with search engines, which means every piece of online brand promotion must contain specific terms and information matched to ranking rules. More time-consuming still, when search engines adjust those rules you have to adjust your content — endless work, and none of it involves communicating with customers.

Even once you finally reach the first page of Google, you still need to build a list and start email marketing, because that is what an overall strategy requires. Think about it: if you take no action when a prospect discovers you, how do you turn that prospect into an opportunity, let alone into a promoter? The key is how you reach your customers. Talking to them over email — a two-way channel — raises loyalty, builds the relationship, and ultimately reaches word of mouth.

So how does email marketing grow loyalty?

1. Personalised messages

When someone remembers who you are, and even what you like, you feel noticed and respected. Personalisation makes an email read as a conversation between you and the customer. A more advanced strategy segments your list and targets specific groups, which lets you personalise further using profile data and preferences, and makes the email more relevant. Personalised, relevant email does not just attract users — it improves loyalty. 94% of businesses regard personalisation as central to successful marketing.

2. Reward and encourage loyal customers

Rewarding customers through email keeps them interested in your brand, and rewarding loyal customers with a special product or service makes them feel respected. Rewards that are unique and specially made raise loyalty further still. You can also offer an incentive that sparks a prospect’s interest in your brand and encourages participation. Automated email marketing makes running this kind of loyalty programme straightforward.

3. Listen to your customers

The most important and most valuable property of email marketing is that it is conversational. It lets you listen to customers rather than only broadcasting at them. Use a real and credible sender to encourage readers into a conversation, and through that conversation gather valuable feedback that improves your brand. If you can reply quickly, the chance of a reader recommending your brand rises by 33%, so email marketing improves relationship marketing to a real degree. And if you use email marketing well and track your reports, you can even analyse market trends from it — something other channels struggle to deliver.

Email marketing is a highly effective tool for raising customer loyalty while building relationships. It also helps establish your brand’s reputation and attract more prospects. Combined with a very low cost, it is the strongest strategy available and an essential one. When you run email marketing, you are not sending messages — you are cultivating loyalty.

What is your view on email marketing? We would love to hear it.