Your subscribers expect to be rewarded for receiving your emails. If you don't reward them, they'll leave.
9. august 2024
I often talk to companies who tell me they are considering creating a customer club or loyalty programme as an addition to their newsletter.
Often they do not quite understand what I mean when I answer that if they have a newsletter, they already have a customer club. Below is my attempt to explain 😀
My point is that if you want someone to sign up to your newsletter or customer club, you have to offer something in return. The same applies if you want subscribers to stay subscribed.
So it is more about what you offer as a reward for signing up and for ongoing engagement, than about what you call the thing your recipients sign up to.
Many people associate having a customer club with members earning bonuses or points, or getting access to special member discounts.
Plenty of people are interested in that – but even if you offer bonuses, points or member discounts, there is (in my view) no reason you cannot offer the same to those subscribed to your newsletter, without having to rename it a customer club or create a separate one so your customers can choose whether they only want the newsletter or want to be in the club.
If you have a newsletter and would like to "upgrade" it to a customer club, it makes most sense for both you and your recipients that everyone already receiving your newsletter is automatically part of what you now call a customer club. It only creates extra hassle if you have one group subscribed to the newsletter and another signed up to the club.
If you need to extend the consent in order to record purchase and behavioural data, and to give people bonuses or discounts, you can simply ask for that extended consent the next time they buy something (and then of course only record purchase and behavioural data after the new consent).
But in my opinion (and experience) you can perfectly well communicate with everyone as though they have the same options.
Most people willing to receive emails, texts or push messages from you will also happily accept any form of reward you want to offer. And most will readily give extended consent in order to get more reward.
Our experience from many years of working with many different companies is that the conversion rate on sign-up forms is essentially the same whatever terms the subscriber has to accept.
What determines the conversion rate is primarily the visitor's quick and often unconscious processing of questions like:
Do I trust this company?
What do I get here and now from signing up?
How many mails will I get by signing up?
Will I get mail from anyone other than this one company?
Can I easily unsubscribe again?
What do I get out of being subscribed in the longer term?
If you send newsletters because you have something you want to sell to your recipients, you should get permission to record their purchases and use purchase and behavioural data for targeted marketing in your own channels as well as external ones.
When you ask customers for permission to record their purchase data and use it for targeted marketing, offering them a bonus or a member discount in return is an obvious move – BUT – it is absolutely not the only way to get satisfied recipients and happy, loyal customers!
Success in getting large numbers to sign up is in fact much more about the concrete benefit they get from signing up than about the long-term advantages of being subscribed.
So you should offer irresistible benefits for signing up – but you can certainly create loyal customers even if the ongoing benefits of being subscribed are smaller!
Once you have a new subscriber who has not yet bought anything from you, your first job is of course to make the first sale.
Whether you make that first sale to a new subscriber comes down primarily to being able to offer the right item, on the right offer, at the right price (which I think I will credit Herman Salling with saying many years ago).
Nobody chooses to make their first purchase from you because you offer them a 1–5% member bonus!
Your first job is therefore to get to know each new subscriber well enough to work out what the right item, the right moment and the right price are for that particular person.
Then, once you have managed to make the first sale, what matters most for whether you sell more to the same customer is the experience you give them through the buying process, during delivery and in the follow-up afterwards.
If you give a poor experience at one or more stages of the buying journey, the customer will not buy again even if you offer a bonus or member discount!
Only once you have succeeded in creating that first sale, and have also given the customer a good experience through the sale, the delivery and the follow-up, does it start to matter what benefits you offer your loyal customers.
AND when you have succeeded in giving the customer a good experience through the whole process the first time, you have a much better chance of getting them to buy again – even if a competitor tempts them with better ongoing benefits than you do.
Clearly, if we are talking B2B, and products or services with professional buyers where customers have a high purchase frequency, it can of course matter a great deal whether your competitors offer a better loyalty programme than you.
But in B2C settings, and especially where the purchase frequency is low, the size and scope of the ongoing benefits play a far smaller role than many companies imagine.
So what am I ultimately suggesting you do?
It depends entirely on your current situation, and on what you want to improve or which new goals you want to meet.
But what I concretely suggest in the great majority of cases is:
Unless you want to create a customer club where members pay a subscription, do not create one newsletter sign-up and a separate customer club sign-up. Create just one sign-up instead, and then ask for the consents you need.
Be aware that the number of sign-ups depends mostly on the immediate reward you offer – so spend most of your budget on that reward (and on marketing to create traffic).
Be aware that your recipients and members want to get value out of being subscribed – but that this value does not necessarily have to be bonuses or discounts. There are many other ways of making them feel valued and exclusive.
Be clear and honest in your communication, and live up to the expectations you give members at sign-up – then they will stay with you a long time.
Be aware that it is the overall customer experience you give your customers that creates loyalty. The way you reward your loyal customers is part of that experience, and like every other part of the overall experience it can strengthen loyalty if you do it well.