Building loyalty with clients via e-mail: three mandatory stages

The goal to e-mail engagement is maintaining the e-mail recipient for the long term.  It is unrealistic to think that one will be able to turn the initial e-mail into a sale for your advertising client. There are three mandatory stages when interacting with clients via e-mail: attract, serve and engage.

Businesses can attract clients through opt-in offers to their contact lists to receive applicable newsletters and/or special offers delivered through e-mail. Businesses can also expand their reach by partnering with other businesses to have their message delivered through the partner's e-mail communications.

Serving clients through e-mail is cost effective, but not often used to its fullest potential. If you can deliver transactional messages or invoices through e-mail, the opportunity exists to add promotional messages in those e-mails. You're already sending them a note. Why not casually slip another offer into the message?

After a business has attracted and successfully served a client, the remaining opportunity for the business is to engage that client. You want to transform that client into a client for life.

Engagement may take the form of a membership community, providing relevant customizable content, or simply retargeting that client to buy more in the future. 

All forms of engagement are well suited for e-mail.

The client has most likely already proven that he is interested in the business by allowing the use of their e-mail address to continue correspondence. Any business should make clear to new, current, or prospective clients that this type of engagement is a benefit of being a client, and that those efforts will take place via e-mail.

Setting up a program that provides an ongoing benefit to the recipient is fundamental to ensuring the recipient stays engaged into the future. Smartly engaging the e-mail recipient helps to increase the life-time value of that recipient.

If properly executed, client engagement via e-mail is a win-win for the business and its client.