3 Step Approach to Successful Customer Lifecycle E-mail Campaigns in China

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When talking about email marketing in China, we might think of promotional emails, newsletters, or even spam, but seldom of lifecycle emails. You may wonder what it is really about.

In a nutshell, a lifecycle email campaign is communicating timely and relevant email messages to the appropriate audience according to the customer's relationship with the company.

Despite the fact that Jupiter Research indicates lifecycle email marketing campaigns generate greater results than other email types, few email marketers in China are taking advantage of this customer-oriented strategy based on the principle of delivering the right message at the right time.

It's easy to understand why. To many marketers who just got on track with email marketing, they find no way to start a lifecycle email campaign. While email marketing is a developing channel in China, let's take the first step by coming up with a simplified lifecycle email campaign strategy. Try to divide your customer contacts into three lifecycles - prospects, engaged customers, and inactive customers. And this is how you could get started:

Turn the First Approach Into a Purchase Through E-mail

Prospects are those who would like to communicate with your company. He might be the person you have met in events or in most cases, a subscriber. Normally, we will send a welcome email to them to strengthen the first impression. But many marketers in China would miss a sales opportunity, as the transaction is likely to happen soon after the prospect contacts you. Don't forget this golden rule. A special promotion armed with a warm welcome always produces magic. The famous sports brand Li Ning is a good reference. In addition to a welcome email for its subscription, it also rewards new members with cash coupons. The result was the campaign not only generated as much as five times response rate than regular promotional emails, but also turned most of its new members into customers.

Discover Up-Sell/Cross-Sell Opportunities With E-mail

Get Inactive Customers Interested in Your E-mails Again

Inactive customers are those who no longer open or click your emails. For many marketers in China, this is the group that is often overlooked because they think inactive customers will no longer be valuable. But that's incorrect. Most of them are still the target recipients, but perhaps your regular emails don't arouse their interest as before. What you need to do is to win them back! A renowned hotel in Macau once sent out three unexpected offers within an email to its inactive customers. And then a follow-up email was sent to recipients who clicked on either offers. Finally the hotel successfully retained 60 percent of its inactive customers.

I understand that time-based lifecycle email campaigns would be difficult to execute for many marketers in China due to huge efforts in preparation. But if the three-step approach to lifecycle emails mentioned above interests you, why not start to review your email marketing tactics again and have a good try?