Today’s consumers are often overwhelmed by emails, promotional offers and newsfeeds. For your business to stand out, it’s critical to preserve a human element — your customers need to connect with your message in order to identify its relevance in their own lives. Here are two ways you can develop a human-centered digital marketing strategy that resonates with your customers on a personal level.
- Personalized Email Campaigns
Email remains one of the most valuable digital marketing tools. With a little personalization and strategy, email marketing can be highly effective for connecting with your customers.
Before you send a marketing email, consider what your goals are and who your audience is. Are you targeting inactive customers with the goal of enticing them back? If so, send a personalized email offering a special discount. Do you want to increase class attendance at your fitness studio? Create an email campaign offering raffle entries to members who bring a friend.
Once you’ve defined your goals, create a personalized email. There are two common approaches to email personalization: shortcodes and segmentation. Shortcodes allow you to replace generic text, such as names, and can increase your click-through-rate from about 5.8 percent to about 7 percent.1 Segmenting allows you to target customers’ unique interests. For example, if you have one group of customers who frequently book spin classes and another group who only book yoga classes, you can send different emails to each.
Before you click “send,” put yourself in the recipient’s shoes to ensure your email is delivering some sort of value—may it be inspirational, informational or promotional.
- Targeted Referrals and Rewards
While email is a great way to put your business in front of customers, referrals and rewards work to increase trust and loyalty over time.
You’ve already won your current clients over — and their trust and loyalty can be spread among their network of friends and family. Referrals are a great way to attract new customers at little to no cost to your business. And referred customers are more likely to stay with a business over time than off-the-street customers.
Similar to referrals, rewards programs promote loyalty by acknowledging customers who keep coming back. While rewards have varied upfront costs depending on what you offer, customer retention pays off over time. It costs approximately five to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to maintain an existing one — and existing customers spend 67 percent more on average.2
When creating a loyalty program, consider: what your customers value, your pricing structure and how frequently your customers make purchases. Look for a business management software that allows you to easily create, manage and track your loyalty and rewards programs.
