SME Knowledge Series 1.5

The ultimate goal of a brand or company is to build a stronghold amongst its customers and increase their customer lifetime value and uphold their image in the market. Customer Lifetime Value is the average amount of money, a customer is expected to spend on your business or your product/service, during his/her entire relationship with your business. This is important to know because it helps you to understand how to make decisions about important factors like how much money & time is needed to invest on a particular customer & how much time is needed to acquire new customers.

Given below are some of the essential marketing tips that can be used to build customer lifetime value via emails. Using these, you can build up a more profitable, successful business, which is focused on attracting & retaining long-term customers.

1. Bring back lost customers

There is a reason behind the step that customer’s take of unsubscribing from the mail list. If you want to retain your lost customers back, you have to make your message stand out. Your emails should connect to them emotionally because even today in the tech world, selling is still about the human touch. Try to send out highly personalized emails like send our segmented emails to the customers to talk about products add-ons, related products based on past purchases, additional offers, etc. The timing matters in triggered emails. So, when a customer abandons your shopping cart, you should send out a quick email to drive them back to your e-commerce store. 

2. Cross-sell to uplift revenue

Build the average value or your orders by suggesting other suitable items to the customers when they purchase a product. Monetizing your existing customer base is the best practice for growing CLV. Just as upsells and upgrades remain options for customers throughout their journey, post-purchase cross-sells through transactional emails can help you increase the customer’s lifetime value.

3. Help your customers complete unfinished payments

Emails are sent to shoppers that successfully place an order, which was not finalized because of the payment issue. Your shoppers are genuinely interested in notifications about unfinished payments. The follow-up or transaction- related emails drive six times more revenues than marketing emails. As long as you are dealing with soft declines errors messages, these follow up emails alone can recover from 5 to 25% of the lost revenue.

4. Notify shoppers about subscription renewals

Use your subscription, memberships, and loyalty program emails to encourage the customers to sign up. Be it voluntary or involuntary, churn is a silent CLTV killer. So you have to make sure that your turn the subscription renewal events into opportunities to reach out to the customers. Don’t be shy when reminding your customers of upcoming recurring charges, to avoid any unnecessary chargebacks or refunds.

5. Recover hard declines through instant emails

Running a subscription business with recurring revenue is great. Your customer signs up for your service to enter their credit card details and is subscribed to your plan.  But there are times when a customer’s subscription is due & the payment fails. The customer might have canceled their card, or the card might have expired or for some reason or there might be an issue with the card issuer, etc. So, you should make sure you send an email notification out to the customers who have faced this issue. The mail should indicate what they can do to resolve the issue.

6. Give a discount to new or loyal customers

This is one of the most tried & tested ways to increase a customer lifetime value. When you send our emails related to discounts to the new customers as well as the loyal ones, this intrigues them to join your brand. So use these emails wisely. By giving a customer the chance to activate your offer, you have the chance to turn them into paying customer & earn something from them, increasing your revenue per customer.

Customer Lifetime Value is important because it is an important metric to look at when considering where to invest your marketing skills & money. It’s not exactly a challenge to invest in the people who are already buying from you than it seems a challenge to get strangers to notice you or your brand.  Once you’ve calculated your CLTV, using the formulas; keep a check out if those key customers worth their weight in gold and go after them relentlessly. Be nice to them & always make sure that your emails are personalized.