Customer retention is crucial for the sustainable growth of your brand. With the rising costs of acquisition channels and recent privacy updates making it more difficult and expensive to attract new customers, it is especially important to prioritize customer loyalty strategies.
Today, it costs five times less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one because existing customers already trust your brand and want to return to buy with you. So what is the best channel to drive customer loyalty? Well, sadly, there’s no one silver bullet, but many marketers turn to email to retain their shoppers.
Email marketing, like Klaviyo, allows for deeper personalisation than most other marketing channels. Email is a reliable way to make your customers feel valued and it helps to build strong emotional connections between customers and your brand. In fact, in 2021 80% of US retailers identified email as the number one tool for customer retention.
In this article, we take a look at how you can use personalised loyalty emails to incentivise a customer’s next purchase and drive customer loyalty.
The power of personalisation
In today’s market, consumers are no longer happy with a “one size fits all” approach. They want and expect personalised communication and experiences. In fact, 72% of shoppers only engage with brands that deliver personalised communication.
To offer personalised content you need to be able to understand your customers’ individual purchasing behavior and customer lifecycle stage. A loyalty program offers you a wealth of meaningful loyalty data that allows you to deliver hyper-personalized email communications to customers. This inevitably leads to more authentic and productive customer interactions.
Personalised emails make customers feel like an individual rather than just a number. When emails are informed by insightful data, garnered through loyalty programs, you can also be creative with how you incorporate personalized elements. This is a reliable way to make customers feel an emotional connection to your brand and encourage them to shop with you again.
Loyalty emails
Loyalty program emails perform 14 times better than regular marketing emails because they’re personalised, relevant and resonate with your customers. So, how can you make your loyalty program emails count and ensure that they encourage customer loyalty?
Use your loyalty data to add personal touches to your loyalty emails. There are a variety of personalised loyalty emails that you can send to encourage customers to return to your brand and engage with your loyalty program. For example, you can send reward notification emails, or emails reminding customers of the benefits of your loyalty program.
Equally, you can send emails containing monthly points statements, discount codes and special offers. By letting customers know they have some sort of benefit in store for them if they engage with your brand, they’ll be more likely to return to shop with you sooner.
To make the most of this opportunity, you can link up your loyalty program with your email service provider to send loyalty emails to customers. LoyaltyLion has a best in class integration with Klaviyo, alongside other ESPs such as Yotpo, Ometria, Omnisend, Dotdigital, Zaius and many more. These integrations will help you maximize your loyalty program potential.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of how you can use your loyalty data to serve up personalised loyalty emails that will encourage customers to return to your store:
1. Keep customers engaged between purchases
Encourage customers to return to shop with your brand by sending regular loyalty emails, such as point balance statements or “reward available” reminders. These actions encourage the next purchase and will even lure in hesitant shoppers.
Your redeeming loyalty program members are a high-value customer segment. Customers who engage with loyalty programs through rewards and incentives tend to spend more. According to recent loyalty research, 49% of consumers agree they've spent more after joining a loyalty program.
Use on-brand loyalty emails to regularly check in with your customers and remind them of your brand values. This encourages customers to return to your store and repeat purchase, choosing you over the competition.
2. Turn your loyal customers into brand advocates
Trust is key in the loyalty game and referrals are a great way to use trust to build a loyal customer community. Research shows that customers are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend. Use your loyalty emails to increase advocacy and acquisition.
Encourage customers to refer friends with unique URLs delivered via email. This is a great way to motivate your existing customers to become advocates on your behalf.
3. Segment your audience using loyalty insights
Use loyalty profiles to send emails that are unique to your customer segments, according to whether they are loyal, at-risk or in need of winning back.
This will help you focus your efforts where you can have the most impact – on increasing the lifetime value of your most valuable customers and re-engaging those at risk of churning.
Supercharge your personalisation with Klaviyo triggers
Email personalisation can be deepened and automated with our best-in-class integration with Klaviyo. Using our integration with Klaviyo, you can set up trigger-based emails to respond to customer actions.
Tailoring every individual message is impractical, which is why customer loyalty segmentation can be a vital solution. You can use segmentation to set up unique campaigns for when a customer’s loyalty status changes.
For example, with Klaviyo, you can set up a trigger that allows you to send automated emails when a customer’s loyalty status changes to ‘Loyal’, ‘At Risk’, or ‘Win Back’. Owning your customer loyalty segmentation will allow you to create emails that encourage repeat purchases, increase your reward redemption and build a stronger relationship with your customers.
The power of emails
Emails are a powerful tool for marketers to use to drive repeat purchases and long-term loyalty because they can be used to engage customers between purchases, segment your audience and turn already loyal customers into valuable brand advocates.
With personalised loyalty emails that highlight points balance, send reward reminders, or encourage recipients to refer a friend, you can strengthen bonds with existing customers and attract new customers to your brand.
To ensure you are maximising the potential of your email strategy, connect your loyalty program to your email service provider so you can send personalised emails.
To learn more about how email can power your customer loyalty, connect with a Loyalty Analyst or find out which ESPs we integrate with.
As Klaviyo Experts and long term partners with LoyaltyLion. Blend Commerce is uniquely qualified to help businesses further their email marketing, with a focus on Customer Experience, Customer Loyalty, and personalisation.
If you're ready to take the first step into powering your email through loyalty. Get in touch with Blend Commerce today.
Published: March 01, 2022
Last updated: October 09, 2024
