Valentine’s Day is right around the corner and there’s no better time to let your customers know how much you love and appreciate them! Taking time to show appreciation costs very little in terms of hard costs, yet it is an important aspect of your customer retention strategy. Major organizations recognize their customers on a regular basis for important dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and you should also consider sending a special “Thank You” message throughout the year. Valentine’s Day is a perfect opportunity for customer appreciation email campaigns. They are a fun way to create messaging that shows your customers some love — and provide a little incentive to shop again soon.
Time to Get Personal
When major brands run an email marketing campaign, they can come off feeling a little impersonal. However, lifestyle brands such as theSkimm have found ways to incorporate fun, frivolity, and a sense of personality into their communications. While ostensibly the email is touting theSkimm’s 5th birthday, they’ve cleverly created a way to show each reader their metrics: signup date, how many emails have been read, time spent reading content, and most importantly—referrals.
The email is much like the weekly Skimm, in that it’s colorful with fun and funky fonts and humor that’s a tad tongue-in-cheek. The brand uses this opportunity to drive referrals by tempting their readers with a potential windfall of up to $15,000. That’s a thank you that won’t soon be forgotten!
Driving Reviews
Customer appreciation email campaigns can help build your reptuation, as evidenced by this Taylor Stitch note to customers. The brand actively encouraged customers to rate a recent purchase and write a review—a great tactic that keeps your brand top-of-mind as well as gives you important feedback from your customers. Positive reviews are important for your online brand reputation, and using a thank you note along with a review request is the perfect one-two punch to amp up your email marketing and provide greater customer retention. (Note: this example does require specific services to create an embedded form, which is not likely available from most email service providers)
Once your customer has submitted their rating, this is also a great opportunity to present them with related products to purchase, another product to review, or even a discount coupon for their next purchase.
Moving On Up
Presenting holidays wishes to your customers when you’re not completely sure which holiday they celebrate can be a dicey situation. Mutual of Omaha came up with a relatively vanilla solution, but it actually works quite well and demonstrates yet another way to capture customer attention in their inbox. While the dark background and white text are basic, the flash of fireworks around the Happy New Year helps bring attention to what otherwise could be a ho-hum kind of email.
This type of email works well for helping the brand stay top-of-mind, but is not likely to do much beyond provide a warm, fuzzy feeling to any readers. A brand that truly does justice to the gif is Illustria in this classic email. The fun graphics perfectly illustrate the beauty of Labor Day weekend and how people feel about getting out of the day-to-day grind and enjoying the sunshine.
Reducing Subscription Churn
Subscriptions are all the rage, as it allows consumers an easy way to gain access to digital content. Content providers love this model because it provides an ongoing stream of revenue that’s often significantly more than what they could charge for a one-time fee. The problem is that there tends to be a fair bit of churn with subscription models, making it imperative that you’re able to keep customers engaged and continuing to find value in your service.
Spotify’s customer appreciation email gives a snapshot of your recent activity as a part of their premium subscription model. While reminding you about all the music you enjoyed, Spotify is also taking the opportunity to encourage you to return to discover more great artists. This customer retention strategy works because it’s showing customers some self-selected items and drives customers back to the service.
Building Better Relationships
Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, what matters to customers is how you handle them. The next customer appreciation email campaign from Extensis could look like a big no-no: a notification to attend an online event was delayed and was actually delivered after the event occurred! The email marketing team at Extensis did an exceptional job of letting customers know what the problem is and what they’re doing to resolve it. They even blamed their carrier pigeons (and are withholding pats on the head). The clever email and the attention-grabbing headline are sure to cause a chuckle, and might even draw in customers who weren’t initially planning to watch their webcast.
From an e-commerce perspective, sending a mea culpa email when you know something isn’t going to deliver on time (for myriad reasons that could happen) can help you get out in front of a customer service call and give you the opportunity to make it right. Send a one-to-one email, or one to a segmented list of customers affected, and you can turn a firestorm into a brand-building moment. In both examples, you let customers know you value both their business and their time, and can turn a bad situation into a good one!
A Simple Thank You
Reaching a business milestone can be exciting not only for the business but also for your customers. This is especially true of businesses that are still in their growing stages such as MINDBODY. They recently celebrated their IPO and took the time to share that news and a bit of their back story with customers through a personalized email from the Co-Founder and CEO. The tone of the email was very friendly, personal and celebratory—inviting each customer to share in the excitement that was generated by their success and showing how each customer helped contribute to getting the company to where they are today.
Simple gratitude definitely has a place in business today, as customers appreciate it when you take the time to express how important they are to your journey. Plus, MINDBODY relates their recent IPO back to the customer by sharing that they’ll put their newfound resources to work to improve overall operations and upgrade technology.
Combo Mania
Lifestyle brand Ugmonk creates simple, versatile pieces with a difference: they often create charity drives to help benefit their communities and the world. One particular partnership with Rice Bowls allowed them to use one of their customer appreciation email campaigns to encourage customers to buy a little something extra to meet a goal of providing 10,000 meals to hungry orphans. Note that the messaging is different from a traditional discount or sale — instead, Ugmonk highlights the results of the purchase. This not only gives customers a wonderful piece of clothing or accessories but also provides them with a great feeling that comes from helping others.
Each of these emails focused on a different way to say thank you, but they all have one thing in common—sharing the love with customers. Creative customer appreciation email campaigns should be tailored specifically for your brand and provide a way to reach out and spread a little joy.
Create Your Own Customer Appreciation Email Campaigns
Designing and sending these emails doesn’t have to be difficult! When you use the Customer Marketing add-on for ShippingEasy, you’ll find that driving repeat business is a breeze. We even have Email Marketing Specialists that help you make the most of your campaigns and email design.
Rob Zaleski
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