Churn is the thing that is reducing your revenues, thereby having a great deal of impact on your business. It is something that each and every company wants to avoid in the first place.
In situations where your customer is unhappy with its purchase, or anything related to your business for any reason, they'll stop using your services.
At this point, your customer base is shrinking, which means that if you don't fix the issue, your growth will start decreasing and sales will decline. In order to retain your clients base, you need to address customer churn.
The best way to do so is by using email marketing as your business strategy. It's a proven method to attract and retain customers. Therefore, in order to retain them in the sales process, you need to create an educational and engaging email campaign.
The aim of retention emails and the whole email campaign is to keep your customers more engaged regardless of whether they are completely inactive or just not using your product as intended.
Here are six important steps on how to reduce customer churn by using email marketing.
Organize your list into segments
When it comes to marketing, email segmentation means identifying particular groups based on specific criteria. Because the underlying fact is that none of us are the same.
Your potential clients are from different living areas and have different interests. And what may be the most important thing, they are indifferent to financial situations. Sending the same mass emails to your entire list of subscribers is therefore incongruous.
Those emails are not giving any important information to your customer, they are generic and useless. However, if you do segmentation of the emails you send, you are targeting your client's interests and helping them to find the product or service they need.
How do you segment the email list?
This is the point where you are creating your avatar. You are analyzing your potential customer, its habits, preferences, and needs.
For example, you can segment your list into groups like readiness to leave, product usage, or training webinar participation. According to your diverse contacts, you should make specific email campaigns according to the needs of targeted groups.
Determine high-risk customers
It is impossible to expect that all customers will be engaged and subscribe to your emails. It's always going to be a certain group that will most likely leave in comparison to others. By identifying them, you can prevent potential churn.
If you are a B2B company, this is one of the best tactics you can pull on when it comes to churning prevention. Content marketing and email marketing with these strategies have shown to be one of the most effective ways to generate leads.
So, the possible high-risk customers are the ones who are inactive or haven't been contacted in a while. Sometimes it happens that company employees forgot to follow up on certain information or guides required by the user at the time. Knowing this helps you correct mistakes made in the customer service process.
Also, you are able to analyze the hidden reasons and you will become aware of actions taken. Therefore knowledge in this area can help you indicate whether someone who acts in a similar way, is likely to stop doing business with you. Having all this information thus sending targeted emails will allow you to prevent churn more effectively.
Identify most valuable customers
As important as it is to identify consumers at risk, it is equally important to identify the most valuable ones. Focus on delivering what they want, what they deserve, and what they expect.
These customers are the ones that are here for the long run. They bring the biggest value to you and your business, so you should do what it takes to keep them.
The interaction history is the best way to determine customer involvement. Whether he or she was engaged at every stage of the process, or whether there were any problems with the product, and what was done to resolve those issues.
Segmentation refers to this part as well. You should be able to divide your customer into groups, and only then you can predict any customer churn.
Provide educational content
To be able to fight churn in the first place, you should be able to show your customer the real value and benefits of your products and/or services.
This way they will gain a better understanding of your brand identity services, form an image, and help them comprehend the benefits of it. So the thing is not only to provide information that can be found everywhere but to create your customer base while gaining their loyalty.
That's why generated emails need to be prevented. Switch up to more educational and visual content, including pictures, gifs, or even videos.
Launch incentives emails
Everyone loves incentives. Special offers, discounts, deals, and sales emails in general are great ways of keeping your customer engaged. These types of incentives offered are considered the most effective way to reduce churn.
However, you should be cautious with these follow up emails. Make sure that you have properly assessed the benefits of offering an incentive for your business. This means that you should not waste your earnings on customers who are unlikely to generate substantial revenue.
Feedback Emails
Another good way to prevent churn from happening is by gathering feedback from your users. By doing so your current users can become your valuable customers while becoming your walking referrals as well.
So, the ones who have used your services, you can ask them nicely to leave a review or recommendation. You can do that by creating a short and simple survey that customers can fill with ease.
Aim to avoid clogged emails with a lot of unnecessary information and images, but rather focus on your message and the action you want people to take. Analyzing your email campaign results is an indirect method to gather feedback.
Moreover, you should keep the track of active customers and monitor the open rate on your email campaign. Identify the links your customers are clicking the most and assess their responses.
This is not only the best practice for increasing email deliverability for e-commerce, but it is a reliable way of encouraging customers to return to your website for additional purchases.
Conclusion
Instead of focusing on gaining more customers, firstly focus on retaining the existing ones. They are shown to be your most valuable assets.
Therefore, your proactivity should concentrate on conditions that will encourage users to appreciate and utilize the benefits your product offers. Beware that most churns do not come from low-quality products, but rather for misunderstanding or the lack of mutual communications.
Your team can reduce churn rates with the right blend of email and content strategies. Organize your segments, identify at-risk and high-valuable customers, show appreciation by offering special initiatives, and send feedback as a token of gratitude.
