3 Ways to Reduce Churn with Email Marketing

Wikipedia defines “Churn rate, when applied to a customer base (as)... the proportion of contractual customers or subscribers who leave a supplier during a given time period.”

If your business depends on recurring revenue streams, and improving customer success is a priority, you’ve likely confronted the opposite of the happy state where monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and customer success are super-healthy.

To help your company reduce churn, let's look at three ways that you can use email marketing to improve the customer experience dramatically. 

Deploy Email Marketing Best Practices for Improving Customer Retention

For each buyer persona that goes closed-won (lifecycle stage advances to customer), the most important email you can send shows how to get the initial value as quickly as possible from their newly purchased product or service. 

The email message's call to action (CTA) goes to a website page or knowledge base post with an embedded video that shows how to get the quick win(s) that drive customer retention and reduce churn.

You'll be able to measure, on a user-by-user basis, opens, clicks, session time on the website page, and view time on the video. 

If your marketing automation supports event-based workflows, consider a follow-up email one or two days later to anyone who hasn't spent significant time on the website page or consuming the video or hasn't shown product/service usage evidence.

Add Interactivity to Your Customer Retention Emails

When you're trying to positively influence product/service usage and customer retention while simultaneously reducing your churn rate, lean heavily on interactive elements that educate and build trust. 

For today's modern content playbook, that's almost always going to be video content. 

So your email message should have a thumbnail of the video with a big "clickable" play button. 

Also, be sure to include multiple calls to action (CTAs) -- buttons and text links --driving to the same website page with embedded video.

This way, you can measure which CTAs drive the most engagement and customer success; and then subsequently optimize the email marketing messages, so the most impactful CTA messaging gets prioritized.

Invest In Customer Insight Research Early and Often

The more you talk with your customers and build/maintain buyer personas, the more likely you'll uncover the pattern recognition you need to see for more effective welcome emails. 

However, this customer insight, especially in a startup seeking product/market fit, needs to be shared across marketing, sales, customer success, and product. 

When you're able to flip great net promoter score (NPS) advocates into case study content, that content can also be used to inspire new customers to follow in the footsteps of your most successful customers that are most similar to them (same buyer persona).

These social proof assets can also be very helpful in proactively reducing customer churn.

What kinds of email marketing campaigns and content assets have you found most effective for reducing churn?