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16 Effective Tactics to Grow Your Customer Base

Kimberly de Silva
16 Effective Tactics to Grow Your Customer Base
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This blog post focuses on the category “Growing Existing Customers”, as the third in a series of 4 blogs about the best marketing tactics to Acquire, Nurture, Grow, and Retain your customers.

 

Regardless of what industry you are in, it’s a well-established rule that around 80% of a company’s revenue comes from 20% of its customers. Existing customers require and, more importantly, deserve a preferential treatment to show that your company values them. Not only will this ensure a consistent and predictable revenue stream, but it will also prevent your high-value customers from engaging with your competitors. So, it’s your job to help customers see the value of your product or service to encourage their continued business with you and, as a result, grow your customer base.

Easy-to-Implement Tactics for Customer Growth:
 #1 ANIMATED IMAGES

Go beyond basic stock photos and leverage animated images and GIFs to capture recipients’ attention in emails, newsletters, social media posts etc. Studies have shown that people can recall 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later – in comparison to about 10% of written content three days after it’s read. When it comes to your products, use animated images to showcase a product from various angles; show more products from the same category; or demonstrate how the product works.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase brand awareness and recall
  • Increase engagement rates
 #2 COUNTDOWN TIMERS

Display a countdown to indicate how much time customers have left to complete a goal before they miss out, like an upcoming event or a special sale. An Experian report found that emails conveying a sense of urgency had at least 14% higher click-to-open rates, 59% higher transaction-to-click rates, and twice as high transaction rates compared to their average marketing emails.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase email open and click-through rates
  • Accelerate the buying funnel by driving urgency
#3 NEWSLETTER PERSONALIZATION

Go beyond first-name personalization with your newsletters. Particularly when your business provides a wide variety of products, it is highly effective to send subscribers a hyper-personalized newsletter that focuses on the top categories that they have engaged with most recently. 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase newsletter engagement
  • Increase LTV
#4 ON-SITE PERSONALIZATION

Knowing the importance of personalization, you should also apply this to your website. Especially since 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized. Personalize banners and blocks of contentbased on the interaction context, as well as the customer profile, to ensure that the visitor’s web experience reflects the desired outcomes.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Decrease visit bounce rates and increase session interaction time
  • Increase conversions
#5 HOW-TO CONTENT

Send how-to content to your newsletter subscribers in order to build a deeper relationship with your audience – rather than a relationship that is purely focused around selling your products. Make it even more engaging by turning the how-to content into videos. DIY and how-to video content is booming and “How to” related searches on YouTube has grown 70% year over year.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase customer engagement with emails
  • Increase adoption of your product and services
#6 RICH MOBILE PUSH

Deliver images, GIF animations, video, and sounds via rich mobile push notifications to customers that have opted-in to receive messages from your app. Rich push notifications deliver a 25% increase in engagement rates compared to text-only push messages.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase engagement with your mobile channel
#7 GMAIL PROMOTIONS

Optimize your emails for the Gmail Promotions tab. Every time you are running sensitive offers andpromotions, your emails need to be optimized for the Promotions tab for maximum exposure. This will ensure your emails render at the top of the tab and consumers using Android devices, such as smart watches, will automatically get notified when a time-sensitive offer is about to expire.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase customer engagement rates
  • Increase offer conversion rates
#8 WEB CROP

Retrieve content from your website and render it automatically in your emails. It’s highly effective for keeping your transactional and business-as-usual emails up to date with the latest promotions and offers without having to update them manually.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase relevancy by ensuring email content is aligned with the latest promotions on your website
  • Save time by not having to update triggered and transactional messages manually
 #9 BEST SENDING TIME

Send regular and triggered communications at the time when the customer is most likely to engage. This ensures that your emails always appear at the top of their inbox, at times when the customer is most likely to read them. This can be achieved through an AI-enabled marketing automation platform or even through manual segmentation. Our users have seen a 15% increase in engagement with our AI-based tool Best Sendout Time.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase engagement with your messages
  • Stay top of mind with prospects and customers
 #10 DEEPLINKING

Don’t neglect mobile! Include deep links in emails that automatically open a relevant page on your mobile app, rather than driving customers to the website. This ensures a seamless experience between email and app, ensuring customers are directed to the exact content rather than having to look for details themselves which increases drop-off rates.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase app engagement
  • Improve customer experience
  • Increase in-app purchases
#11 BIMI

Ensure your logo is shown by adding Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) to your emails. This ensures that your messages stand out in the recipient’s inbox, as well as reassures the recipient that the message has been genuinely sent by you rather than someone pretending to be your company. Or worse, a phishing email aiming to gain access to their personal information.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase customer engagement
  • Increase brand exposure
  • Increase email deliverability
#12 PREFERENCE CENTER

Capture explicit communication preferences from each of your customers. 60% of marketers don’t give subscribers the option to select the types of emails they want to receive, and only 30% of marketers allow their subscribers to decide how often they want to be emailed. Preferences, in addition to basic contact details, are a simple and effective way to enhance relevancy and personalization of your marketing campaigns.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase relevancy and engagement with your communications
  • Foster brand loyalty
  • Decrease unsubscribes
#13 IN-STORE TERMINAL ANALYTICS

Capture customer behavior in store as customers interact with interactive terminals and kiosks. Once all stores open up again, you can implement this tactic. This can provide valuable insights on how you can improve the customer experience in-store, as well as identify cross-channel customers.

 Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase in-store conversion rates
  • Identify cross-channel customers in-store
#14 AMP FOR EMAIL

Use AMP to send interactive and dynamic emails. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) allows customers to complete basic actions, such as reserving a table in the restaurant or completing a form without having to click through to your website. While AMP Email is still relatively new (only supported by Gmail, Mail.ru and Outlook.com), it can make your emails much more attractive to those subscribers.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase goal completion rates
  • Double email engagement rates
#15 APP GAMIFICATION

Gamify the app experience by rewarding customers with badges and showing them how they are leveling up with a list of loyalty-based achievements. Even if your app is not an actual game, your customers will feel appreciated and will keep working towards the next badge. They are a great way to persuade customers to express the desired behavior that is linked to your key engagement KPIs.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase app usage
  • Increase customer loyalty
  • Enhance customer experience
#16 USER GENERATED CONTENT

Encourage your customers to interact with your #brand on social media and feature user generated content in your next communications. This will act as social proof to other prospective customers that your brand is admired by thousands of people like them. It will also increase the engagement rates by people that interact onsocial media, as they will be looking out for their content to be featured in the next email, post, or on your website. A whopping 84% of millennial consumers claim that user-generated content on company websites has influenced the way they do online shopping to some extent.

Why implement this tactic?

  • Increase your brand presence on social media
  • Increase customer engagement
  • Increase customer loyalty

 

Want more tactics to grow your customer base?

Our new Digital Marketing Playbook is a collection of 100 tactics to Acquire, Nurture, Grow, and Retain your customers.

>> DOWNLOAD MARKETING PLAYBOOK HERE <<
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