Whatever your business, gathering data allows you to maintain and maximise your customer relationships whilst also providing a valuable marketing tool that you can use to help your business grow. Even if your business is predominantly offline, you may still have a company website or online booking system to gather leads and client information – or a form of offline media such as a database or spreadsheet that does the same. Email marketing is a great way to utilise this data to send your customers important information, build relationships and enhance their customer experience.
Deliver Value For Your Audience
There are several types of emails that you can use to deliver value for your audience:
- Transactional – first contact with customers directly after their initial purchase
- Post-purchase – Prompting further interaction from customers after a purchase
- Product Review – Product-specific feedback
- Sales and offers – Updating customers with sales information
- Key event – Prompting awareness and participation
Transactional emails are designed to continue contact after the initial purchase and present key facts about a transaction that has just been completed. In some businesses, particularly retail, the cashier may ask if you would like an email receipt for your purchase. These can help to reinforce the brand, linking in-store purchases and experiences to the digital world.
Post-purchase emails can be sent to a customer after an in-store purchase and perform best when personalised. An example of an effective post-purchase email might be a bookshop following up with a customer by making recommendations of other titles related to their previous purchase (e.g. sequels or other books in the same genre.)
Product Review emails can be used to ask for reviews, for instance on your business Facebook page, or Google My Business profile. You can then use these reviews both in-store and on your social media account.
Sales & offer emails are a useful tool for independent retailers. Whilst the larger supermarkets like Tesco and Sainsburys can call on huge amounts of data to create hyper-targeted emails to drive footfall back in store, smaller convenience and newsagent businesses can still benefit by building an email database of their local and loyal customers. These emails can be used send out information on new launches, sales and other offers in-store.
Key event emails can be the most direct way to demonstrate commitment to your customers and encourage further engagement from them – celebrating birthdays, anniversaries and other dates that are important to your customers. This type of email is ideal for gift shops, florist businesses and even barbershops to prompt customers to think about buying products or booking appointments for special dates and occasions.
It’s important to make sure you are complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when collecting the data. But all these different email types can add benefit to your business by extending the customer experience beyond your bricks-and-mortar premises.
Download our digital marketing guide for more ways to use emails to grow your retail business and make your digital assets work for you!
