Getting Your Customer Relationship Management Right With Newsletters

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Why do customers unsubscribe from your mailing list? According to a GetData study published a couple of years ago, irrelevant and spammy content make up two out of the top three reasons. Also, over seven percent of the people surveyed pointed out that they unsubscribed because the content was not tailored to their preference.

With the average person receiving nearly 88 emails per day, it is not surprising that consumers are ruthless when it comes to marking irrelevant promotional emails as spam, or unsubscribing from lists that they voluntarily signed up for. Getting your customers’ preferences right is extremely crucial and even a single slip-up here is enough to get consumers to unsubscribe from your list.

Segmenting your customers

Marketers routinely segment customers based on the page they signed up from. A visitor who purchased a men’s t-shirt from your online store may be added to your mailing list for ‘male fashion’ while a visitor who purchased a necklace, for instance, could be added to your list for ‘women jewelry.’ Such targeting is easy to execute and may also seem relevant from the outset. But quite often, the purchases are not made by the consumer themselves, but by others on their behalf. This is why segmenting your customers solely on their purchasing history may not be the right approach.

A better approach is to consolidate all of a visitor’s actions and reach out to them based on these events. These actions could be based on several parameters like customer health (is your customer unsatisfied and is prone to ask for refunds, or are they happy with your service?), engagement, product usage and repeat purchases. You could then use a tool like Segment to tie in this information with your email marketing software so that you send unique messages to a customer based on specific behavioral patterns. A customer who buys a printer cartridge every two months may appreciate a coupon sent their way right in time for their next purchase.

Making content less spammy

Customers do not tolerate spam, even if it comes from a retailer they have already transacted with. What’s worse is that even if your customers do tolerate them, your newsletters are very likely to hit the spam folder if the content appears spammy. The first thing to remember as an email marketer is that a newsletter is not the same as a sales page on your website. Phrases like ‘Act Now’ or “100% free” may trigger conversion on a sales page, but can trigger the spam filters when they are part of an email.

Even if your emails manage to get past the spam filters, it is important to acknowledge the difference between a sales page and a newsletter. Visitors to a sales page are inbound in the sense that they land here from ads that they clicked on, or from Google. The customer is in a buying mindset and trigger words like ‘Act now’ help improve conversion. Email marketing on the other hand is outbound and could often reach your user when they are not expecting to be sold. A ‘salesy’ newsletter could not only be annoying in this context, but could also lead to the customer unsubscribing from your list and/or marking your email as spam.

Building trust and credibility over the email platform is not an easy job. But by understanding the mindset of your consumer and knowing what they prefer and what they do not, it is possible to establish a medium of communication that not only elicits higher engagement from your subscribers, but also improves conversions and sales.

Ganesh Mukundan
Hiver
I'm a content marketer at Hiver. I've been writing about customer experience for the past 5 years. I'm passionate about narrating delightful customer stories, researching CX trends, and deep-diving into concepts such as VoC and Customer Journey Mapping.

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