Email automation can be used for a variety of purposes; to respond to contact actions and behaviors, or help move a customer along their customer journey.
One of the less obvious ways you can use marketing automation is to help develop and strengthen customer relationships, by using a few simple email automations.
“Reach out” campaigns provide simple messaging that encourages customized, friendly check-ins with your contacts that reinforce your relationship.
These campaigns provide the opportunity to promote your support and caring attitude towards your contacts.
While not all campaigns are meant to be automated, these six automated emails will help strengthen customer relationships.
- Happy Birthday Campaign
- Customer Appreciation Campaign
- How Can I Help? Campaign
- Interest Tagging Campaign
- Testimonial Campaign
- Social Follow Campaign
Six Emails that Strengthen Customer Relationships
Happy Birthday Campaign
The purpose of a Happy Birthday campaign is to send your contact’s a special message on their birthday.
This email can be paired with a special offer or coupon code to use towards future purchases.
This email can be set up in an automation that is triggered by date field.
For examples of a Happy Birthday campaign, check out:
10 Happy Birthday Email Marketing Examples
Customer Appreciation Campaign / Anniversary Campaign
A customer appreciation campaign can be sent anytime, however, it’s always a great reminder to send to your customers on the anniversary date of their first purchase.
Similar to the Birthday campaign, the customer appreciation email can be paired with a special offer or coupon code to used toward future purchases.
This email can be set up in an automation that is triggered by date field.
Examples of Customer Appreciation Emails:
How to Write Thank You Letters to Your Customers
20 Best Thank You Notes to Show Customer Appreciations
How Can I Help?
The How Can I Help campaign has a variety of uses, however it’s intended purpose is to offer support and assistance to a contact.
A How Can I Help campaign can be triggered by date or behavior. For example, this campaign can be sent 5 days after purchase to “check in”, as a response to a less than positive product feedback survey, or if someone becomes disengaged on your list as a method to reengage the contact.
This email should include:
- Support options (links to FAQ and other instructions)
- How the contact can obtain support if they would like to respond
Interest Tagging
An Interest Tagging campaign is to used to identify your contact’s specific interests so that you can continue to send them the right communications and the right time.
In this campaign, you can list out your top-performing blogs, or hot topics.
With each link in the email, you add an action to track user behavior. Each click will help you begin to identify what topics and categories your audience is most interested in.
Once you start to gather your audience’s interests, you can:
- Send your audience additional content or offer’s based on their specific interests.
- Gather information to identify topics you should leverage more within your own content creation.
For more information on product interest tagging, check out the Product Interest Tagging recipe on ActiveCampaign.
Share Your Success
The purpose of this email is to obtain testimonials and social proof from your existing customers.
Whether you are offering a low-, mid-, or high-range product or services, everyone wants to hear about what has worked… and people generally love to share their successes.
This email can be set up in automation that is triggered by a date; for example 30 days after purchase or 7 days after service delivery.
This email should include:
- The product/service name and description
- Examples of social proof from others
- A CTA to submit and share the reader’s own testimonial
9 Examples of Testimonial Emails That Work
How to Request a Testimonial from a Client
Social Follow
The Social Follow campaign invites contacts that have visited your website, to follow you on social media. This automation is triggered using Site Tracking.
For more information on how to set up the social follow campaign in ActiveCampaign, check out the ActiveCampaign automation recipe.
For additional support in developing your social follow campaign, check out: 3 Ways to Turn Email Subscribers into Social Media Fans.
How to Strengthen Customer Relationships
When setting up your new email automations, remember to consider the design of your campaign. Open and click rates on these automations can be boosters for your overall deliverability if set up correctly.
Always be sure to test your automations before turning them on live for your contacts.
What other emails are you using to help strengthen your customer relationships? Drop me a note in the comments below 🙂
