Merging best customer marketing and e-mail marketing creates an explosive combustion of results. This includes higher revenues, profit margins and customer retention. Best customers are usually multichannel customers, and e-mail marketing, on a cost-per-touch basis, remains cost effective for reaching this group. Best customers purchase higher volumes, purchase more frequently and prefer e-mail.
Relevant e-mails reach customers when they feel ready, with information that they want.
Relevant e-mails engage. Best customers already feel engaged with your brand, so they expect to hear from you about sales or new products.
Managing best customer relationships can deliver significant results. It’s common to see a 50% or better lift for relevant e-mails over generic e-mails. Product propensity models for cross- and up-sell often generate more than 100% lift. Trigger-based programs linking multiple communications together for re-sell or on-boarding can yield up to a 300% lift. Bottom line: E-mails make your best customer even better.
Get a 360° view
Best customers interact with your brand through the store, Web site, e-mail, phone, events, promotions and contests. They reveal themselves through surveys, profiles and subscription centers. All behaviors need to be tied back to the individual customer in a database. This allows for segmentation, lifecycle definition and actionable marketing opportunities.
Define best customer
Best customers have different needs, wants and behaviors. Segmentation beyond RFM is needed and should include lifetime value, future lifetime value, product propensity, purchase patterns and communication preferences.
Know and manage the buyer lifecycle
All customers fall into specific buyer life-cycle stages. To move a customer through them and to truncate time between stages, actionable offers must be delivered. The more personalized the offer and relevant the timing, the greater the conversion.
Metrics and measurement
All customer marketing should be closed-loop and measurable. Automatic reports with measurements remain necessary to test and ensure effectiveness. For as little as $10 annually, 10 to 40 relevant e-mail touches using the key considerations above can create a long-term, fruitful relationship with your best customers. A bonus awaits companies that effectively marry best customer marketing and e-mail marketing. They discover that the resulting lessons and programs apply to the rest of their customer bases and drive even greater return on marketing investment.
