Once you’ve landed a new customer, you’re on your way to earning repeat and bigger purchases. Customers that have bought from you once are three times as likely to purchase from you again, and repeat customers will spend 20% more with your business than first-time buyers.
Keeping customers engaged with your brand after the sale is a crucial part of scaling revenue – if you aren’t keeping in touch, you’re leaving money on the table.
That’s where email nurturing comes in. Email nurturing is an automated way to stay top of mind with your customer base through the pairing of marketing automation with your CRM database.
Here are four simple nurturing emails you can use to build a customer loyalty and drive repeat sales.
Welcome New Leads To Your Business
An excellent, logical first step when adding a new customer is to welcome them with an introductory email. With marketing automation, you can automate your welcome email to send when someone fills out a form on one of your landing pages, or when a contact’s status is updated to “customer.”
Your welcome email can be short and sweet, but it’s a good idea to summarize in bulleted format what they can expect to receive from you in the nurture series. You can also link to further information for them to check out, and include a contact phone number or email if they’d like to get a hold of you.
The following are some examples of great welcome emails I’ve received from brands and small business owners.
The Outbound Collective’s welcome email is visually pleasing while also combining a few tips on how to get started on their website to maximize using their product:
Comparably’s welcome email is an example of personalizing a nurture email—it doesn’t appear to be overly designed so you can’t tell it’s a marketing email, and the founder signed it. This gives the impression the founder is interested in interacting and hearing from his customers, and the email has a nice, personal touch.
Send A Setup or Support Guide
Once you send a welcome email, it’s a good idea to send tutorials, guides, how-to videos or other types of supporting content that can help your customers get associated with your business. If you’re a gym, you can send post-workout tips or fitness advice. If you’re a restaurant, you can send tips on joining you for future events or weekly specials you might have like 25 cent wing night on Wednesdays.
Make sure the content you’re sending adds value to your customers and highlights the benefits of your product. If a nurture email with setup or supporting docs doesn’t fit your type of business, then you don’t have to send it. No email at all is always better than an email that is fluffy and doesn’t add value to an ever-growing inbox.
One example of an email including supporting information is from SoulCycle. After the date of your first class, they’ll send a great nurture email that tells their customers how to make the most of a SoulCycle studio and their new exercise regime. This is a value-add for patrons of their spinning studio:
After signing up for SquareSpace, their nurture email series is all about onboarding new customers to their platform. The below email is a great example of including a mini tutorial or guide to getting started in the body of a nurture email:
Tell Your Customers About Your Social Accounts
I don’t see brands and businesses doing this enough, yet a lot of businesses are running cool communities on social media. It’s not enough to just list the links to your social accounts in the footer of the email or the footer of your website. Be sure to send an email that tells your customer the neat things that you’re up to online. Invite them to join a Facebook group you’ve started where they can connect with other community members or let them know your business is on Instagram and will feature customer photos every week by using a particular hashtag. If you’re launching interesting campaigns on your social sites, alert your customers to these campaigns so they can choose to engage with your business on social as well. For example, Lyft sent the below email to alert their passengers of a fun Halloween campaign they were running:
Send Additional Content & Resources
Finally, another best practice is to send content to your customers. Even better, segment your customers to provide them with content that directly speaks to an interest you know they have. For instance, have them identify a specific interest within a drop-down menu on a form. Then you can create content campaigns for each of the interests featured in the drop-down menu.
If you’re sending content in a general welcome nurture campaign for new customers, it works just as well to inform your customers of the fresh blog posts and videos your business is creating. Point them to your blog or resources center, or send a newsletter that highlights content they can click to read further. By sending your customers content they want to read, they’ll have an extra incentive to stay subscribed to your email list.
The below email is a great example of a welcome email from a small business owner, Cody Sattler at CSATT Fitness. In his welcome email, he’s combining two tactics I’ve mentioned: 1) telling his customers about social communities they can join and 2) providing content he’s created that his customers can consume.
BONUS TIP: Email Nurturing Best Practices
Finally, here are some best practices to keep in mind as you send nurturing emails to your customers:
Send Emails From the Right Person
Email nurturing is effective because it’s personal. So don’t have emails to your customers come from a generic email address. Instead, have emails come from someone within your company. For instance, have emails come from a name your customers will recognize – like their account manager or support contact.
Personal communications are always better than a ghost behind a business, and your customers will feel like you’re making a personal effort to reach out and welcome them.
Respect Unsubscribes
Always give email recipients the option to unsubscribe from your email communication – even your customers. Remember, an engaged contact who wants to hear from you is always better than a giant list of leads who aren’t interested in becoming a buyer.
Nurture campaigns are the easiest way to make sure you’re continuing contact with customers. Keeping your customers engaged is crucial to winning the repeat business most companies thrive on.