The customer journey begins with creating awareness of a brand or product and ends in the targeted users becoming loyal customers and advocates of the brand. Email plays a crucial part in shaping the customer journey.
Automated emails get sent according to specific triggers that the customers set off during their interactions. These emails help continuously influence and nurture the leads from initial engagement to conversion and beyond.
Emails that are segmented and personalized according to the different stages of the journey give a tremendous boost to the ROI. This blog helps you understand and decipher the various stages, applications, and benefits of the customer journey emails.
How does email engagement help enhance the customer journey?
Email engagement and customer journey have a symbiotic relationship. Together, they are responsible for increasing the business revenues.
Email engagement helps enhance the customer journey by:
- Collecting user data from responses
- Discovering and assessing the buyer persona
- Segmenting the users on different criteria
- Sending the right message to the right audience
- Leveraging send time optimization for engagement
Automated email engagement allows companies to send, schedule, and execute email campaigns at various points of the customer journey. The rules set in the software trigger an action (for instance, send an email) when specific conditions are met. Automation helps marketers by guiding them to send emails depending on the recipient’s behavior, needs, demographic traits, or interest.
Once the customers are segmented depending on data and analytics, marketers get actionable insights to improve their strategy depending on the customer behavior. Email automation helps execute data-oriented communication strategies for potential customers in different stages of their journey. Customer journey mapping and segmented emailing that follow help nurture the leads to conversion.
Stages of a customer journey
A customer journey is the path a prospective customer travels while establishing a relationship with a brand: the first stage is awareness, and the end goal is advocacy.
- Awareness
- Evaluation
- Purchase
- Loyalty
- Advocacy
All the stages can be used to quantify a customer’s journey via different marketing channels; let’s look at how they are implemented in email enagement especially.
How does email engagement drive the customer journey?
Awareness
In the initial stage, the objective of your emails should be not to sell but to reach their inbox and engage. Introducing your business is a significant step in acquiring potential clients and guiding them to the following stages. Some places to start are:
Critical for email marketing, a landing page works as a gateway to your campaign and should be created carefully. Choose a page that can quickly offer all relevant information to prospects; it could be your home page or a product page. Add compelling content and an easy sign-up form to acquire the customer’s email address.
You cannot do effective email engagement without a hygienic email list, so get this part absolutely right. Make it simpler for the site visitors to find and fill out the sign-up form. Grab their attention with elements like short pop-up forms.
Once the subscriber signs up, send them a warm welcome email. Ensure the email is friendly and reflects the customer’s interest in your company. Personalize your automated emails as much as possible: the name should be correct and the subject line relevant.
Consideration
Once your prospect has shown interest in your brand, they are ready to be taken to the next stage. At this point, use emails to develop trust in them for your brand to help them decide that you are the best for them.
You can educate your subscribers about your products and services in many ways. Email campaigns help give them the right nudge to keep moving ahead in their journey. Prioritize emails that meet subscribers’ paint points and resolve their issues. Your emails should focus on selling points like effective pricing, efficiency, and convenience. Guide them with a solid review, tutorial, or ad to help them reach a conclusion and take the leap.
Explain what would be the perks of joining you. With so much competition, why not explain why your brand is better than them? You may or may not choose to name your rivals, but send a mailer stating what you offer, and others don’t.
Often, your customers were about to place an order but didn’t hit the button for some reason – don’t let them be in limbo. You can set up an automated email series to follow up with them and remind them to purchase. The reminder emails can include the product or service images, share what other customers say about the product, and to be more generous, offer a limited-time discount.
Purchase
The subscriber is halfway through the customer journey, and your job isn’t over yet. Your customer is favorably inclined, but you should still accompany them. So, your emails must communicate and prove to them that they were right in making the buying decision.
Use email automation to let them know their order is received and confirmed. You can also use this as an opportunity to share delivery time expectations.
Sending automated emails with details and regular updates to the shipping and tracking is essential. It will make the customer feel one step closer to getting their order.
Retention
Retaining a customer is more affordable than acquiring a new one. Someone who has already purchased from you will see your brand value. Convincing them to re-purchase will need lesser efforts. So, don’t skip regular email engagement to convert a customer into a brand loyalist.
You can initiate follow-up by automated connection-building emails such as thanking customers, offering codes for the next order, and requesting a product review or shopping experience feedback.
First, figure out the best-fit audience for announcing the new product. Segment the email audience based on the customers’ pattern of buying related or upstream product categories, and add a discount coupon to try the new product.
Often, certain categories of products/services would need replenishment. In such cases, you can provide a subscription plan or an auto-pay method. However, if the customer hasn’t signed up for such services, send them reminders for re-order.
On festive occasions, make your offers unique and special to your customers. Ensure you stand out from the rest by leveraging insights from historical data and email segmentation to match customers’ interests and behavior patterns.
You can reward customers for their loyalty by making them a part of your loyalty program. Your loyalty email can include information to redeem their reward and the program’s major benefits. Ensure your loyalty program offers value to your customers and makes them feel special.
Advocacy
The last stage of advocacy is perhaps the most cost-effective strategy for your product and the brand. Happy customers can be great ambassadors; encourage them with the right messaging in your emails and they will spread positivity.
Sending a personal thank you message is an essential and engaging email instrument. It helps deepen your connection with your customers. You can follow through with some gratifying offers on related or complementary products. Such gestures will make customers vouch for you and increase their lifetime value.
Referral programs work great through email automation. Your customers can make referrals to their friends and others and win a referral commission as an incentive. You can send a series of emails to explain and educate your customers on how to work on your referral program.
Optimize your customer journey with email engagement
Businesses should develop a simple and enjoyable customer journey to help their customers evolve from prospects to brand advocates. Focus your email engagement efforts on helping customers along in their journey. A journey that is well begun and completed smoothly can improve conversions and persuade consumers to keep coming back.
The streamlined features of automated email engagement help customers smoothly advance from one stage to another. All you need to do is create the right messaging at every stage of the customer journey.
Several top-notch brands across industries and geographies partner with Netcore Cloud’s AI-powered email api platform to uplift their email revenues and boost ROI. Our email wizards consult to achieve your KPIs and email marketing goals. Connect with us to understand how you can benefit from our expertise and experience – we send over 187 billion emails a month for businesses across 18 countries.
