Bertha's Blog: 4 Ways to Use Email Campaigns Outside of Marketing

A 2015 MarketingSherpa study shows that consumers prefer to engage with companies via email rather than other channels like social or phone. If you’re not sending emails to your customers, you’re missing out on a big opportunity (and we should probably have an entirely different conversation), but if you only send promotional emails, you’re underutilizing a valuable channel for communication.

The average marketing campaign focuses on publicizing offers and new products to get customers to make an initial purchase. In this article, we’ll look at four email campaigns that go deeper. These non-marketing campaigns are mostly designed to build better relationships with existing customers.

1. Customer onboarding

An onboarding email campaign is more complex than just confirming a new account. Those first emails should set the tone of interactions with users, provide educational value, and encourage people to become active users (a major step on the way to recurring income). All of these emails should be short and sweet introductions, rather than deep dives. You can follow up later with those who respond.

To start this campaign:

Connect your email marketing tool with your CRM platform so you can pull lists of new customers.
Decide what tone your team should take with new users.
Determine the major steps the ideal customer takes to fully engage with your brand/product, and build an email for each of those.
Test and iterate by watching your engagement and making changes as needed.

2. Continued education

Educational emails add value throughout the customer relationship and position your company as a credible authority. They also have the added perk of actually helping the customer understand more about their business, current trends, and pitfalls to avoid.

To start this campaign:

Look into your current customer-facing content (blog posts and articles, guides, webinars) and determine the most-read content. Start by sharing that first.
Adjust your strategy based on engagement metrics. This includes cutting back on content that doesn’t engage and building new content that gets more of clicks and shares.
Don’t get spammy with this strategy. Think of this as a newsletter, where sending more than a couple times per month is too much.

3. Deeper engagement

Deepening customer engagement is a great way to use your internal resources to get help writing content. If your customer support team knows of a particular problem that most users encounter, you might save them hours by covering that topic in a blog post or video that you share via email campaign.

Engagement campaigns also work to spotlight existing tools and deepen current customer understanding of your product.

To start this campaign:

Refer to your customer support and tech teams to learn where customer pain points are. When customers have been with you a few months, what feature or function should they learn next?
Research feature usage and customer behavior on your site. Are there whole sections customers miss entirely?

These emails can build a sometimes-user into a power-user, giving them insight and specific support for tools or products they might otherwise overlook.

4. Reduce churn

Churn reduction starts long before the customer considers other providers. If you have a churn problem, you had an engagement problem, first, and that requires some research. Determine your average amount of idle time before people cancel, and build a “we miss you” campaign that attempts to reconnect with these customers.

Anti-churn campaigns remind customers to engage with your product or brand. If you plan correctly, you may be able to reignite conversation and solve customers’ problems before they metastasize. Sure, you’ll have some people who realize they’re still paying for your product/service and decide to cancel, but if you wait longer, you may have to issue these customers some sort of refund anyway.

To start this campaign:

Ask a question: When you ask for feedback, you get people thinking about your product. You can measure engagement through their responses.
Think about running this campaign at a small, personalized level first, and make sure your support team can handle all the responses before you open it up.

Again, it’s important to use the feedback you receive from email campaigns — either directly from your customers or in the form of engagement data — to define your suture email campaign and customer-focused strategies. By paying close attention to how customers interact with your outreach, you’ll better understand your target market and how you can better serve customers from the start of their journey.