The driving force behind many successful businesses is the ability to retain customers and keep them loyal. Keeping in mind that it is always cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one, it is important to make it simple, advantageous and rewarding for your customers to buy your products or services. One great way of doing this is via email marketing.

Email marketing offers a great platform for winning and growing customer loyalty, which will ensure that your customers keep coming back to your business instead of turning to your competition for their goods and services. Email marketing enables a company to retain customers by growing their loyalty. This is easily done by remembering personal information, and providing great offers based on this customer data.

To begin, assist your customers in remembering to buy the things they may need. Because we are all busy, we may forget to buy certain necessities in good time – especially when we don’t need these purchases often. A good example would be sending out emails reminding a client to buy their contact lenses twice a year, as customers are unlikely to mark this on their calendars. Such an email marketing strategy may apply to other small businesses such as hair salons, lawn care and chiropractors.

Another good way of building customer loyalty is by remembering your customers’ birthdays and giving them a birthday offer. You may do this by simply collecting their birthday month information at the point of sale and then create a segment per month in your email marketing software which will send a birthday offer to all customers born during that month. Offers may include a free meal, drink, pedicure or manicure, or any other incentive that would fit what your business offers. It makes customers feel good that you remembered their birthday, which gives them a great reason to buy from you and recommend you to their family, friends and colleagues.

In order to further the success of an email marketing campaign, a good digital marketing agency can develop a campaign which enables you to remember important dates such as those on which your customers need to do things for others. You are thus able to provide real value and help to customers in the form of emails on days such as Mother’s Day. This serves in reminding your customer that they need to shop for a Mother’s Day gift, as well as making your store the right place to do this. You may also ask your customers to provide the anniversary or birth dates of their loved ones and then send them gift reminders along with special coupons which they may use in purchasing gifts from your store.

By Sarah-Jayne Culver; a Search Consultant at http://www.fdcstudio.co.uk/ providing Digital Marketing Services throughout the UK.