Investing in customer relationships and keeping in touch with them through omnichannel marketing reinforces how important your customers are to you. When you invest in these relationships, they’ll return the favor by staying loyal to your brand.

So, how do you turn new customers in to regular shoppers? Follow these seven easy steps:

1. Welcome your new subscribers

Similar to my Dad winning over my Mum – and as the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression – Dotdigital’s automation templates can help you guarantee that your first contact with new subscribers sets you up for success.

I usually advise a two- or a three-campaign welcome automation. If you’d like to understand what I suggest goes into each campaign, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Essentially, with a welcome program, you want to drive engagement and learn more about your customers. You need to know their interests, so you can send them relevant content. Enriching your customer insight at this stage will help you build a foundation on which you can leverage leading to lifetime value.

2. Send personalized transactional emails

Transactional emails are non-marketing, administrative-style emails that you send out to individual contacts once. For example, if they’ve bought something from you, or have forgotten their password and want to reset it, you would send them a transactional email. They’re things like order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password reminder/reset emails.

Important: Transactional emails should not contain any marketing content.

If you sell products online, you should send transactional-style emails. Our transactional email module enables you to send your non-marketing emails to contacts via SMTP or via our API, allowing you to manage and track your transactional email using the platform.

Using Dotdigital’s omnichannel marketing automation platform ensures that the campaigns match the look at feel of your brand.

Transactional style emails earn some of the highest open rates of any email type, so make sure you’re getting the most out of them.

3. Use the right channel

If you’ve been with Dotdigital a while, you’ll know we always talk about ‘sending the right message, at the right time, to the right people, using the right channel’.

How do you know which channel your recipients prefer? Simple… Ask them!

Use a preference center and historical behavioral data to deliver your messages on the right channel, whether that be email, SMS, social media or push. It may also be a combination of two or three of those channels. You need to accommodate your contacts as much as you can and I assure you, you will see an increase in engagement and, in turn, conversion.

4. Consistent branding

There’s a high chance that your email campaigns aren’t the only interaction or communication your recipients will have with your brand. In fact, your recipients probably visited your website before signing up to receive campaigns from you.

Because of this customer journey, it’s important that your email campaigns are aligned with the colors, fonts, and branding you use across your other channels.

It helps your customers to know that the email campaign is from you and it creates a level of trust and credibility which reassures people it’s safe to click through.

One of Dotdigital’s customers, Daisy London, provides effective consistency between its website and its email campaigns. Take a look…

If you’re a Dotdigital customer, this can be achieved with ease using our drag-and-drop email marketing tool. You can choose from a range of designer-selected, web-safe fonts, and select your brand’s hex color. With these features, creating a high-converting email campaign that instills trust among your recipients is effortless.

5. Reward customer loyalty

With 91% of customers checking their inboxes daily, email and SMS offer the perfect opportunity for the direct person-to-brand relationship customers crave. On top of this, emails paired with your loyalty program perform 14 times better than regular marketing emails.

Loyal customers spend 67% more than new ones.

On average, loyal customers spend 67% more than new ones. With carefully crafted and segmented loyalty emails or SMS, you can target these customers with the right message, encouraging them to become regular shoppers who spend with you again. Send messages that keep these customers updated about their points balance, the rewards they’ve gained and the new offers that are available to them. This way, they’ll be reminded of the benefits of shopping with you and will be more likely to return.

Try and go above and beyond by thanking them for their loyalty. It goes a long way in customer retention. We have a library of loyalty automations you can utilize within Dotdigital.

Want to know the ins and outs of customer loyalty? Dotdigital’s partners can help you out:

• LoyaltyLion is trusted by thousands of growing ecommerce merchants to increase customer retention and spend through effective loyalty programs.
• Yotpo enables brands to build customized, on-brand loyalty and referral programs to incentivize repeat purchases, referrals, and social engagement.

6. Segment, segment, and segment some more

If you’re a customer of mine, or have been in the past, you will have heard me harp on about how important and crucial segmentation is. Gone are the days of batch and blast or spray and pray (they’re the same thing!) and you need to break your data in to relevant segments to ensure you are sending relevant content.

Learn as much as you can about your recipients.

Be organized with your data from the very start and I assure you it’ll stand you in good stead further down the line when you want to send targeted emails. Learn as much as you can about your recipients and what they’re looking for and use this vital information to send messages that are relevant to them.

Your preference center will help with segmentation. Look at your campaign report data and segment based off those results. Check out the ecommerce module within your Dotdigital platform and segment based off RFM – we make it SO easy for you to segment, so you don’t really have any excuse not to do it.

Segment rant over.

7. Say happy birthday

Who doesn’t like a birthday? Perhaps my aforementioned Dad now that he’s hit 64, but in general, it doesn’t matter how old we get, we all love a freebie on our birthday. We have almost come to expect some sort of birthday gift, voucher or discount code from the likes of restaurants and retail brands.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, wishing someone ‘Happy Birthday’ with a great deal is always a winner. Just add a date data-field to your Dotdigital signup form and create an automation which includes a celebratory message or gift. We have a template all ready for you to customize.

Dotdigital provides you with all the tools to ensure your new customers become regular shoppers, no matter where they are in their lifecycle journey. We want to make sure your customers keep coming back.

Now that you’re ready to persuade your customers to stay connected to your brand… What’s stopping you?!

Check out this best practice guide for more tips on how to turn new customers into regular shoppers:

Data-driven, customer lifecycle email campaigns are designed to deliver messages to customers at a time that suits them. It’s an email marketing strategy based on the idea of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time, throughout the whole business cycle.

Marketers can adopt highly specific and targeted email marketing techniques, due to the sophisticated nature of data collection and ever-advancing developments within Dotdigital. It’s time to make maximum impact.

Sending the same emails to everyone on your list is wrong and hinders your growth

At any given time, each customer is at a different point in their relationship with your product or brand. Think of the customer’s lifecycle as a journey – everyone has their own journey in their own time. Rather than sending bulk generic emails to all your recipients, customer lifecycle emails are targeted to specific customers at crucial points in their own individual journey.

With the level of advanced email tools available to date, batch-and-blast emails should be a very small proportion of the emails you are sending. This mentality of quantity over quality is no longer effective in today’s email marketing world.

Leaving behind the spray-and-pray mindset and focusing on lifecycle marketing is the key to increasing email ROI.

Customer lifecycle marketing is the key to increasing email ROI

Basing your email campaigns on the customer lifecycle will produce better conversions, because the email content targets the individual recipient. Even if your recipients don’t convert right away, they’ll still find your emails valuable.

How you define your customer lifecycle is specific to you and your brand. The typical customer lifecycle includes these five stages:

1. Prospects

Prospects are people or companies who aren’t customers… yet. They fit in with your buyer persona and they’ve had a minimal level of interaction and engagement with your brand.

Make sure to encourage them to make their first purchase; incentivizing them with a discount always helps. Ensure you set up a welcome program to make that important great first impression.

Here are some nice welcome email ideas:

• Nasty Gal prompts new contacts to check out the blog and connect on social.

• Kate Spade’s compelling welcome message gives you four reasons to visit the online store.

• FUNFIT welcomes new subscribers with a 15% off their first order along with useful CTAs.

2. Active customers

These are people who have already made at least one purchase. It can also apply to those who have made multiple purchases. I would recommend segmenting these customers into several groups based on their purchasing habits.

For example, you might split those who purchase seasonally separately to those who purchase weekly. You need to ensure you keep these customers engaged so they continue buying from you. Additionally, you should be sending these customers transactional emails and replenishment emails.

3. At-risk customers

I class at-risk customers as those who were previously active but whose behavior has since dwindled – i.e. they haven’t made a purchase in a while.

How you determine when a customer moves from ‘active’ to ‘at risk’ is entirely dependent on your products and customers.

If you’re an automotive online brand, you may only expect the customer to purchase once during their car’s lifespan. However, if you’re a women’s fashion brand you might place someone ‘at risk’ if they don’t make a purchase after 30-60 days.

Deliver tailored content to each segment

You need to turn these at-risk customers in to active customers before they lapse. I won’t sugar-coat this; it can be difficult to re-engage someone unless you know specifically why they lost interest.

In addition, one of the most effective ways to contact them is through email, which doesn’t help if they’ve learned to ignore your emails. Try and understand what caused the customers to disengage initially.

You can’t send every email subscriber the same content, you must segment based on their past interactions with your brand and deliver tailored content to each segment. Optimizing the frequency of your emails will also help so you don’t overwhelm your customers.

4. Lapsed customers

These are the customers who have long gone past the point they were supposed to make a purchase and don’t respond to your emails. You need to reactivate these customers. Like at-risk customers, I’d suggest running some win-back style email campaigns to turn lapsed customers in to active customers. It can be tough, but not impossible. Lapsed customers don’t work in our favor as they are further away from your brand. Trying to win back old customers will make you understand why it’s so important to keep your current ones!

And remember, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. So, don’t let your customers drop off!

5. Advocates

Look after your advocates, for these are the people that not only purchase your products regularly, but also promote your brand – on social media or simply by word of mouth. They are at the height of the customer lifecycle.

You want to nurture and reward these customers, so they stay engaged and continue to promote for you. You may decide to send your advocates special content – make sure to include something exclusive in your emails to drive home the point that your recipients aren’t like your regular customers.

Here are a couple of ideas of loyalty-style emails:

• Starbucks rewards customers with bonus stars when they buy coffee and extended happy hours.

• Madewell thanks its customers for joining the Insider gang and outlines all the ‘just-for-you’ perks.

You need to map out your customer lifecycle and create emails for customers at each stage. This will improve your conversion rates and build a stronger brand following.

Although it may require some time and resource for strategy and implementation, once set up, it will deliver business results continuously. Your dotdigital account manager can help with this – make sure you get in touch.

Want more great content? Check out these ways to make your marketing automation smarter.

The key time to improve your customer experience and relationship is immediately after his or her first purchase – while the brand is at the forefront of their mind. To encourage this relationship, it’s important to communicate with customers regularly. Curate messages that have a personalized tone, prompting them to engage with you.

There’s no better time to talk to and engage with a customer than after they’ve demonstrated they’re willing to trust you. Here are our top tips!

Don’t forget your manners and show that you care

Say ‘thank you’. These two little words can really make an impact on your customer’s post-purchase experience.

How-to guides

You want to ensure that your customer enjoys their purchase; a simple ‘how-to’ guide can realize this and reduces the risk of returns from frustrated customers. This can be done in a variety of ways: you could provide an infographic in your email, embed a video tutorial, or include a link which will take them to a dedicated page on your website.

Product care tips

Like the above, the intention here is to ensure your customer is getting value from the product they’ve ordered and to encourage them to engage with their purchase. Help them maximize the product lifecycle with an email containing lots of product care tips.

Product feedback

A successful way to improve customer experience is to ask for feedback from your customers on the products they’ve purchased. Bear in mind that the time frame around reviews will differ according to what type of product they’ve purchased. Telling your recipients how their feedback will influence the products or services you offer will help to increase your response rates. Using Dotdigital’s survey tool will help you achieve a quick, effective, and sophisticated feedback form. All responses will be automatically matched and appended to your existing database records.

Replenishment reminders

Replenishment emails are automated emails that are sent to customers when their product is about to run out, so they can re-order. They’re useful for all sorts of products; makeup, pet food, skincare, food and health products. It doesn’t take much effort to create a replenishment reminder and they can be sent automatically with little management. This simple attention to detail can really improve the customer experience. As a brand that offers expediency, your customers will view you as both dependable and trustworthy.

Bring back lapsed customers

Another excellent example of post-purchase engagement is the win-back email. You might, for example, send to someone who’s made a certain number of purchases in the past, yet hasn’t placed an order in the last six months. This will enable you to target these customers with an email containing a voucher or discount code.

More engagement ideas

Keep your customers engaged, but be careful not to make your post-purchase emails too pushy – customers may not be ready to buy from you again just yet. Instead, look for ways to keep them engaged. Here are our most effective ways to guarantee engagement:

• Invite them to follow you on social media
• Tempt them with tailored product recommendations email – use this feature in Dotdigital to insert dynamic products into your campaigns
• Invite these contacts to sign up to receive your email newsletter for special offers
• Set up a loyalty program and invite them to join
• Offer an incentive to ask them to share your brand with their friends
• Send a discount code for their next purchase

Consider SMS

You might think SMS marketing is just a great way to get those sales in. It’s also a proven way to follow up and communicate with your customers after their purchase. Delivering relevant content is exactly how you get them to repeat their custom.

It’s this personal, friendly, and yet professional service which builds relationships and keeps customers from lapsing.

If you would like to understand how SMS can help your business, please feel free to give your account manager a call.

Post-purchase programs in Dotdigital

Choose from a blank template or, if you’re looking for a helping hand, select one of our pre-built templates. They’ve been designed for a range of different purposes, so you should find one that’s right for you.

You only need two things to get started with a post-purchase program in your Dotdigital:

1. Two triggered campaigns (containing external dynamic content blocks with links to your bestsellers)
2. Order Insight data (synced from your ecommerce store)

Your ultimate goal is to make sure your customers have a great experience with your product and service. Ideally, the experience will stick. They’ll keep an eye out for your communications and return to purchase again. Never forget that a well-conceived post-purchase strategy can win you customers for life!

For more inspiration on post-purchase marketing, download our whitepaper.