How to Drive Repeat Business With Email Marketing


Small businesses face all kinds of obstacles when it comes time to drive repeat business. 
It’s not that your customers don’t want to come back. But if you don’t give them a reason to connect with you, your business might slip from their minds.

That’s where email marketing comes in.

Sending regular emails keeps your business fresh in your customers’ minds and entices them to reconnect with your business.
Just ask Kaarina Vera, marketing director at The Inn at Seaside in Seaside, Oregon. Kaarina uses her email list as a way to stay in touch with her existing customers and encourage them to stay again.
“It’s important to maintain our guests and market (and remarket) to them. All of these are returning guests that have stayed with us. It’s important to keep them by sending these emails.”
Want to try email marketing for your business? Sign up for your free, 60-day email marketing trial!
Let’s take a look at Kaarina’s marketing approach and how it can work for your business:

1. Use eye-catching images and attractive design.

A chief challenge in email marketing is creating an email that is visually appealing, fresh, and engaging.
Luckily, you don’t need to be a designer to make a great impression in the inbox; all you need is a professional email template, customized with your business branding.

Here’s an example from the Inn at Seaside:
email marketing accomodation template
In this email, you can see Kaarina starts with the Inn’s logo, an engaging headline, and a vibrantly colored beach photo.
Following the photo, there is a quick message followed by a very clear call to action: “Book Your Beach Trip”.  
Keeping your message short without a lot of adornment leads to great open and click rates. In the example above, Kaarina received a 23 percent open rate and 11 percent click-through rate, resulting in over 300 clicks to the Inn’s website.
Best of all, once you have a look and feel you like, you can save time by creating a reusable email template, which allows new content (like seasonal images and the current specials) to be easily added without needing to reinvent the wheel every time.
“We kind of just use our templates and then copy them and redo them,” Kaarina said.
Tip: Use these 8 steps to create a reusable email template in record time!

2. Drive bookings with timely offers.

The average reading time for an email is measured in seconds. That’s almost no time for you to get your message across.
Make good use of short attention spans with an offer your subscribers can’t ignore. This is one of the main reasons Kaarina first turned to email marketing:
“We started using email to market to returning guests, letting them know, ‘Hey, there’s a special’,” she explains.
Here’s how Kaarina promoted the inn’s recent pre-summer special:
drive repeat business with email marketing example
For these promotions, timing is everything. Send an email when your customers are likely considering going on a summer vacation or attending a convention. Pique their interest with upcoming events, remind them of why they liked you to begin with, and offer a small incentive to book again.
The email above resulted in over 370 website visits, with over 320 of those clicks going directly to the inn’s reservation page.

3. Use your repeat customers to drive new business.

One of the best things about repeat customers is they can help get the word out about your business. Inn at Seaside encourages their customers to leave reviews for their business, which they feature in their email marketing, as well as social media.
Driving repeat business through social media example
When someone hears about the Inn at Seaside for the first time, they can easily see positive reviews and endorsements from returning guests.
Additionally, if a guest hasn’t returned in a while, being reminded of these special moments could be just the push they need to come back.

Small businesses have enough to worry about.

Retaining and re-engaging past customers shouldn’t be a pain point.
Follow these simple and repeatable steps to get your existing customers back and generate the word-of-mouth promotion that you can’t pay for.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Create a Social Media Posting Schedule

Image
You know that sticking to a schedule is important for your business. It helps you get through your never-ending To Do list and keeps everything running smoothly. The same is true when it comes to your social media marketing . Creating a social media schedule is the best way to stay on top of your social media marketing. Still not using email marketing to increase your social media reach? Start your free 60-day trial today! How can you create a social media posting schedule for your business?  Use these tips to create a schedule that works for your business. Understand which networks are right for your business  With almost two billion unique monthly users, Facebook is a good starting place for many businesses. But, depending on the audience you’re trying to reach, there are lots of other great networks to choose from — including Twitter , LinkedIn , Pinteres t, or Instagram Remember, you don’t have to be on every network. Start by building a presence on ...
Read more

4 Tools to Help You Integrate Your Social Media and Email Marketing

Image
  Many of you already use email and social media marketing to promote your small business or nonprofit. But how many of you integrate your social media and email marketing ? Here are 4 easy tools that will help you do just that: 1. Add social media buttons Adding social media buttons to your emails is a great way to let your readers know where they can find you on various social media networks. Fans can also click the button within your emails to see your organization’s social profiles. To add buttons, make sure you’re in the “Edit” mode of a block. Then, click the “Social” tab in the tools on the left side of the screen. When you click on one of the networks, you can choose which kind of button you want to use. Just make sure you add the link to your page in the link box. It’s important to use your unique Facebook URL, such as www.facebook.com/constantcontact , so that users are taken directly to your page. Click the “Insert” button to add the button to your block a...
Read more

Record shares of Americans now own smartphones, have home broadband

Image
  Nearly nine-in-ten Americans today are online, up from about half in the early 2000s. Pew Research Center has chronicled this trend and others through more than 15 years of surveys on internet and technology use. On Thursday, we released a new set of fact sheets that will be updated as we collect new data and can serve as a one-stop shop for anyone looking for information on key trends in digital technology. To mark the occasion, here are four key trends illustrating the current technology landscape in the U.S. 1 Roughly three-quarters of Americans (77%) now own a smartphone , with lower-income Americans and those ages 50 and older exhibiting a sharp uptick in ownership over the past year, according a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2016. Smartphone adoption has more than doubled since the Center began surveying on this topic in 2011: That year, 35% of Americans reported that they owned a smartphone of some kind. Smartphones are nearly ubiquit...
Read more