To learn how to make a remarkable journey for your customers — one that keeps them coming back for more — you’ll need to understand and implement the below concepts.
- Branding Consistency — The only way that your subscribers can build a relationship with you and/or your business is if the branding across all your emails is consistent. The colors, logo, and even “From” address should remain consistent across campaigns.
- Upselling — It’s far easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to a brand new person who’s never bought from your business before. For that reason, upselling can be a lucrative strategy for your email marketing campaigns. You could, for instance, offer matching socks if someone bought a pair of shoes, offer a free one-month upgrade if someone signed up for your service, or provide a coupon that expires one week from the person’s first purchase.
- Multi-Step Forms — From the customer’s perspective, it is much more difficult to make a single big commitment to your company than it is to make multiple small, progressive commitments. Which is exactly why multi-step forms are so remarkably effective. When someone is going to purchase your product or sign up for your service, using multi-step forms (forms which ask for the required purchasing information as individual steps) can increase conversion rate and decrease cart abandonment. Plus, if you use multi-step forms for when people subscribe to your email list, you can determine their interests and segment based on those interests. It’s a small change to your customer journey that can have a massive impact.
- Post-Purchase Emails — It’s easy to assume that, once someone purchases from you, that’s where the customer journey road ends. But that isn’t true. In fact, the post-purchase experience is sometimes even more critical and important than the pre-purchase experience. From the customer’s perspective, that’s where the rubber hits the road, where they learn whether they can really trust you to deliver on your promises or not. And the better you treat them after they’ve bought from you, the higher the chance that they’ll buy from you again in the future. A Thank-You email campaign and an email that asks for a review are two examples of this.
- Subscription Centers — A subscription center refers to a place where your subscribers can set their email preferences and directly tell you what content they want to receive from you or your business. Having a subscription center where your audience can manage their email preferences is a great way to find out more about the people on your list and what kind of content they want to receive. If you want to optimize the customer’s or subscriber’s journey, then you must have a subscription center.
- List Segmentation — Segmenting your email list by interests and/or behavior is a critical step in optimizing the journey for your customers. A proper list segmentation strategy allows you to send relevant content to your audience and relevant offers to your audience, reducing list fatigue and increasing engagement.
- Cohorts — While you can segment your list based on different interests or behaviors, you could also segment your list based on different cohorts. These are basically different customer or prospect personas that you’ve created for your business and determined that each needs to be treated a bit differently. Examples of different cohorts might be decisive buyers, skeptical buyers, indifferent subscribers, and cold subscribers.