By now, we should all know how important customer success is to our businesses. If our customers aren’t realising value from our companies, they’re likely to disengage and take their business elsewhere.
Email and SMS are great ways to increase the engagement that your customers have with your brand. They’re also great ways to provide your subscribers with valuable and meaningful content.
The suggestions below are by no means quick fixes – they do require a little forward planning. But done well, they should see you build better relationships with your customers and enjoying a more engaged subscriber base.
So without further ado, here are my top 4 tips for increasing customer engagement with email and SMS marketing:
1. Educate your customers
Almost every company can create a relevant educational series of emails about their product.
If you’re a not-for-profit, maybe you want to educate your donors about the impacts your donations have had, or share case-studies of people your organisation has helped.
Or if you’re a retail clothing store, you might like to share an educational series on some “must-have wardrobe style ideas”.
Whatever you land on for your topic, make sure your educational content is engaging, adds value for your customers and is relevant to your brand.
2. Reward your active subscribers
Using a scoring system, you can assign points to your subscribers for their engagement with your email campaigns.
Opened an email? That’s 1 point. Clicked on a link? That’s 5 points. Sent your email to a friend? 10 points, and so on.
You can then send out special offers to your customers when they reach a certain number of points, to say thank you for being such an engaged reader.
With Vision6, you can even automate the entire scoring and reward system.
Not only will you have happy customers, who are rewarded for engaging with your messages – you will also be able to run targeted campaigns for those customers who might have a low score, to help them find value in your product again.
3. Send exclusive offers via SMS
Make your customers feel special by allowing them to opt-in to your exclusive SMS list.
Let customers know that by opting-in to your VIP SMS list, they’ll receive special early-bird offers and promotions, before anyone else knows about them.
With an open rate of over 99%, SMS is a great way to increase your customer engagement.
But make sure you use SMS wisely – our phones are very personal, so the content you’re sending needs to be valuable.
4. Run special events for your subscribers
If you’ve never run one before, hosting an event for your subscribers can seem daunting.
But events, even in the form of online webinars or live streaming on apps like Periscope, are a great way for your subscribers to get lots of extra value.
Just make sure that the event you’re running does add value to your customers and is relevant to your business.
For example, a real estate company might hire a stylist and run a session on how to “style your home to sell”. A beauty salon might sell tickets to an event on “contouring and makeup application”.
No matter the event topic or style that you choose, remember to take lots of great photos (or record the event if you’re holding it live online) to put in your follow-up emails, blog and social media posts.
That’s a wrap on my top 4 tips for increasing customer engagement and value with email and SMS marketing.
