How to Turn First-Time Customers Into Brand Advocates with Email Marketing

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By Jacob Maslow

Email marketing is still one of the most potent tools for businesses of all sizes. Despite being one of the oldest marketing methods, email marketing remains so viable because of the direct access that it grants to the customer.

More importantly, it can be tailored to meet your customer’s demands. You can craft specified campaigns for certain aspects of your audience. You can create tailored sales, specials, and more to entice and develop sales.

But most of all, email marketing can be used to build brand loyalty. One of the most significant battles any business faces is building brand recognition and brand loyalty. Having brand advocacy is something that any company strives for.

How can your business achieve that? Here are a few things that can help your business begin to earn that brand recognition and advocacy through email marketing that you have been looking for.

Gratitude Emails

A “thank you” can go a long way. While it can take time to do something entirely personal for everyone, the next best thing can be achieved. Creating tiered messages for the various niches within your target audience can help each message feel personalized.

These gratitude emails can also have attractive offers within. Maybe they are referral links that have benefits attached. Perhaps they are social media links that offer bonuses for subscription services, and so on.

Offering gratitude through email marketing can go a long way toward building brand loyalty and advocacy. However, don’t forget about the people who have been the most loyal to your business.

Cart Reminders

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, things get added into shopping carts that don’t make it through the checkout process. This can be because an item was accidentally added, or maybe it was added, and then the person just never finished checking out.

A great way to personalize the customer experience through email marketing is to send out cart reminders. It can ensure that customers don’t forget your brand and bring them back to purchases they may have forgotten about.

You can also provide alerts that stock may be limited, which can get customers to act quickly in response. It is a great way to continue attracting customers who may be interested somehow.

Sending Surveys

Gathering information is essential to any business. The more information you have on your target audience, the better you can craft marketing campaigns to garner further interest from that target audience.

So, what better way to garner that information than through email surveys? These surveys are a great way to gain knowledge directly from the source itself. In addition, they can provide feedback about your business that can help you make improvements that can ultimately make your company more attractive to the target audience.

More importantly, these surveys can help you identify those customers with whom you can continue working. These are the ones most likely to be advocates for your brand as a whole and the ones with who you will want to work most closely with over the coming months and years.

Offering Similar Products

Believe it or not, offering similar products through email marketing is not only one of the most common marketing techniques there is but also one of the most persuasive. Many companies make similar products to significant name brands that don’t make sense for the buyer. They can also be quite annoying if they repeatedly show up in that buyer’s inbox.

But with contextual advertising, you can find the right niche by putting more effort into proper targeting. First, make sure that promotions are based on past customer experiences. This will not only keep your brand in the mind’s eye of the customer but will be the fastest way to turn that customer into a potential brand advocate in short order.

You don’t have to be “as good” or “as popular” as the major brand on the market. You just have to get your brand in front of the correct audience in a more creative way.

Avoid the Filters

Email marketing is effective if you are not overdoing it and know how to best communicate with your target audience. But if you are the type to inundate your customers with email after email, it won’t be long before they are all being directed to the spam folder.

When those emails start hitting the spam folder, it doesn’t matter what you do to make them unique and targeted to the customer. Some of that comes down to the spam filter as there are advanced filters made to track any promotional email, so some of it is unavoidable.

But you can avoid some of the most common mistakes. Minimize the use of words such as “sale,” “free,” or “special offer” because, most of the time, these are going to be flagged and treated as junk mail. Don’t use a lot of exclamation points, either. While it may seem like a simple thing, it can quickly turn into something that gets avoided if it comes off as overly excited.

Most of all, make your intentions genuine. Don’t try to “get one over” on the customer. Put out what you are offering and why you think it can benefit the customer. Sometimes, all it takes is a little honesty and transparency to at least get the customer’s attention. Whether they stay and partake in that product is another thing, but you have their attention for a short while. That is a significant part of the battle in itself.

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