Leverage Email Marketing To Boost Customer Retention For Your Subscription And Membership Business
Do you run a subscription or membership business? If yes, you know how tough it is to get customers to sign up.
And it doesn’t end there. Once customers sign up, it’s critical to keep them engaged. And while there are many engagement strategies, one works particularly well — email.
In 2022, 77% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement during the year. And so, if you’ve ignored email for your eCommerce subscription and membership business, you shouldn’t.
Email still holds importance. In this article, we look at customer retention email strategies for eCommerce subscription and membership businesses.
Ecommerce customer retention email strategies and examples
Thank you emails
A small gesture such as a ‘thank you’ goes a long way in retaining your customers. It has many benefits.
- A thank you email opens a two-way conversation with your customers. When they (customers) take favorable action, you reciprocate with a ‘thank you.’
- It helps build credibility and trust. Customers get a good feeling when brands make an effort to express gratitude.
- Thank you emails give an opportunity to combine other marketing strategies such as incentives, discounts, etc.
And there are many opportunities for online stores to send ‘thank you’ emails. Here are some:
- When customers sign up for subscriptions or memberships
- When customers place an order
- When they complete a milestone. For example, a year or when they reach a specific number of orders or rewards
- When customers share feedback or reviews
- When customers share referrals with you
- When they follow you on social media
- When they like or share your social posts
- When they subscribe to your newsletter
Now that we know why and when to send a thank you email, it’s important to understand how to craft a good thank you email for your eCommerce subscriptions and memberships.
For example, ensure you convey something positive in your email by making it personal. Include details about what you are thanking the customer for.
Also, it’s important to send the email in a timely manner as soon as a customer takes action. The best way to ensure this is to automate your thank you emails. You can set up email automation through your subscriptions/ memberships app.
Here’s a thank you customer retention email example:
| Hi (customer name), We’re thrilled you’ve joined our membership program. To give you a peek into what’s in store, have a look at this video: (link) And as promised, you’ll find 500 loyalty points added to your account. You can log in to your membership account and access the points. We hope you enjoy your membership. |
Customer feedback email
Don’t we feel good when brands respond to our every action? It makes us feel like they care.
One way to show your Shopify customers you care is to request feedback. It’s a way to give them a positive feeling about your brand.
When you care to ask customers about their experience, they feel good. And a pleasant post-purchase experience is a must to build long-term customer relationships.
Moreover, 93% of customers read reviews and ratings before transacting with brands. Hence, collecting feedback is vital for your Shopify subscription business, too.
You can send different types of feedback emails:
- Ask for general feedback on their purchase experience
- Ask for feedback on their eCommerce membership or subscription experience
- Request feedback on products and services
- Combine feedback emails with incentives
But just collecting feedback is not enough. You must address it.
For example, if a customer shares negative feedback, you must reach out to the customer to understand and address their issues. You can also offer them incentives to ensure they do not cancel their eCommerce subscription from your store.
Here’s an example:
| Dear (customer name), Thank you for your response and for sharing your feedback. Please accept our sincere apologies. We truly value your relationship with us. We are sorry to hear about the delayed delivery of your order. We will look into the matter and make sure this doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, as a token of our appreciation for your patience with us, here’s a 15% off on your next purchase. Use code 15SHOP Thank you |
Transactional update email
Keeping your customers informed is a big deal when you want to build long-term associations. And with so many communication channels accessible on smartphones, transactional updates are something customers expect immediately from brands.
Sending timely transactional update emails can take your communication to another level.
- It helps to eliminate customer anxiety and panic
- It ensures customers have all the important information
- There’s no room for assumption or confusion
- It makes your brand look professional
Here are the types of transactional updates you can share via email:
- Order placed
- Payment received
- Order dispatched
- Shipping and tracking details
- Order delivered
- Order cancellation
- Order return request received
Upsell and cross-sell emails
Many online businesses think their work ends once customers sign up for subscriptions or memberships and that the subscriptions will work automatically. But that’s a big mistake.
As a brand, you must constantly help customers make better purchases and discover new products on your site. Your customers should find value in their purchases. And if they keep buying the same items, they’ll stop seeing the value at some point.
That’s where upselling and cross-selling emails come in!
Upselling involves recommending better products to customers. For example, if you notice your subscription customers are buying the same items every time, you could recommend products that are better.
But here’s the thing, make sure the recommended products are relevant and add value to them. For businesses that sell recurring products—eCommerce subscriptions and memberships—70 to 90% of the revenue comes from upsells.
And what is cross-selling all about?
Cross-selling involves offering recommendations of products or services that complement customers’ recent purchases.
For example, if a customer has a subscription of baby diapers, you could cross-sell baby cream to them.
Here’s an upselling example:
Now let’s look at some cues on how to make upsells and cross-sells help in customer retention:
- Make upsells and cross-sells relevant to customers by identifying a problem that you could solve for them
- Upsell and cross-sell new products you introduce in your store. That way, you can get more customers to try out new products
- Make sure your upsells and cross-sells offer more benefit and value to customers
- Make sure the upsells and cross-sells are priced higher than what the customers currently buy from you
- Your upsells should either improve the customer life, solve their problem, bring them joy, or meet their need
- Upsells need not be a new product/service. It can be an added benefit, product, or service to what the customers are currently buying from you
Product review requests
The more social proof you share, the better it is for your Shopify business. One of the best social proofs is customer reviews.
Customers expect brands to have between 50 and 100 reviews for every product. The more reviews that other customers will read, the more trust they will build in your brand.
Requesting reviews can be another of your customer retention email strategies.
You can request reviews via email for:
- The products bought by customers
- The services used by customers
- An overall review of your subscription or membership business
- Review of your customer service
Here’s an example of a product review request email:
Renewal emails
Another customer retention email strategy is to send renewal emails. Customers might forget their subscription and membership renewal dates. And so, you should send them renewal reminder emails.
This strategy helps in many ways, such as:
- Helps remind customers
- Customers can update their personal details before the renewal
- If customers don’t respond to your emails, you can take the necessary action
Reassurance email campaigns
Here’s the truth — your customers have most probably joined other eCommerce subscriptions and memberships. And it’s possible that if you don’t communicate enough with them, they may forget about you.
Or, that other brands are engaging more with them and so they start seeing more value in those brands compared to yours.
In essence, constant communication can become the backbone of your engagement strategy.
The goal is to show customers the value of your subscriptions and memberships, such as:
- How it works: Send emails about how your eCommerce membership or subscription business works. Customers might miss out on some features, so it’s better to share the information with them.
- Highlight benefits: Create email campaigns to highlight how the membership or subscription benefits customers, so that customers take the maximum advantage. Besides, customers will know you care about them.
- Customers’ savings: Send them emails to inform how much they have saved. Customers might not realize the actual financial benefits unless they put it all together—this is something you can do for them.
- New products: Send them emails to show new products you’ve added to your inventory. Because customers sign up for subscriptions and tend to order the same items, they might not care to look at what’s new in your store until you share the information with them.
What does your subscription and membership email marketing look like?
We’ve shared some of the most effective customer retention strategies with you. However, to make the most of these strategies, you must set up email automation for your eCommerce membership and subscription.
To avoid installing multiple apps on your Shopify site, we recommend choosing a membership and subscription app that provides email automation features.
Appstle Subscription and Loyalty and Appstle Membership and Loyalty apps have built-in smart automations. The apps also provide integrations with powerful email marketing apps.
Explore Appstle subscription and memberships app for your Shopify store.
