Why email marketing is still the most effective way to build customer relationships

Business landscapes are becoming increasingly competitive. Customers are inundated with messaging – in their inboxes, on their phones, through their social media channels and when they turn on the radio, TV or browse YouTube.

“In our experience, companies today are able to build much deeper relationships with customers than ever before, and one of the key reasons for this is their ability to maintain constant and open channels of communication,” says Karyn Strybos, Everlytic’s Marketing Manager.

“However, if you want to build meaningful long-term business relationships, you need to be consistently communicating with your customers without being intrusive,” Strybos continues.

How well do you know your customers?

Strybos suggests asking these key questions of your business’s communication and distribution channels:

• Do you have the data to understand and identify what content will resonate with your target audience?
  
• Do you know your customers well enough that you can create smart, personalised messages?
  
• Finally, do you have a distribution system that can deliver personal messages at scale?

“Personalised messaging has a number of key benefits, from connecting with customers quickly and effectively to delivering on-point messaging that shows your customers that you understand them and have their best interests at heart,” says Strybos. “Customers who believe they are understood and heard tend to be happy, repeat customers, because you’re building and maintaining relationships.”

Email’s role in customer retention strategies

Based on 2018 data from SmartInsights, email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing.

With the right technology in place, email is a powerful behavioural marketing tool that can totally alter the relationship that a brand has with its customers.

In fact, personalised recommendations and other automations can turn a customer’s fleeting flirtation with a brand into a lucrative, long-term buying pattern.

“People respond to content that seems to speak directly to them and addresses a need, concern, or challenge,” says Strybos. “This only works if you understand your customer deeply.If you do, and you have an open channel of communication that you’re leveraging to have the right conversations, then you’re building an incredibly powerful relationship with your customer base.

“It’s for these reasons that businesses want a reliable, easy, effective, and compliant way to communicate with their employees and customers securely and at scale,” says Strybos.

Solutions that meet a variety of needs

“In our experience, businesses that can benefit from our solutions either don’t have the tools to effectively communicate with both internal and external stakeholders; need to build more personal and strategic messaging; require a means to build stronger business relationships; or are working with slow and frustrating legacy or manual communication systems that don’t offer analytics, automation or personalisation”, adds Strybos.

In response to these challenges, Everlytic has released a white paper, Smart Customer Engagement: How to Build Meaningful Business Relationships through Personalised Messaging, which unpacks strategies to build stronger customer relationships, the role communication plays in business, and the value of messaging platforms such as email.

To download your free copy, click here.

About Everlytic

Hundreds of brands use Everlytic, including Old Mutual, Comedy Central, Computicket and many more. Everlytic customers are delighted with the effectiveness, ease of use, and the support that its solutions and teams offer. With an impressive sending volume of about four million emails a year, Everlytic stands proud as a world-class South African email and SMS messaging platform, recognised and endorsed by leading industry experts.

To find out more, visit our website here.