How to Keep Your Existing VIP Customers Engaged with Email?

When given a chance to interact with your customers, would you use the same messaging to communicate with people who’ve made their first purchase and repeat customers? Well, you wouldn’t. It is because they are entirely different audience segments. While the former has just been introduced to your brand, the latter knows your brand better.

Businesses often refer to the latter category as VIP customers because they have made a significantly higher number of purchases or they have a high lifetime customer value attached to them. They have probably contributed more to your bottom line than any other customer. Hence, as a business, you naturally gravitate more towards them and make extra efforts to retain them.

Crafting well-planned and personalized nurturing email sequences is one of the best ways to keep your VIPs engaged 365 days of the year. If you pull this off correctly, you can generate a whopping 4,200% ROI on your email marketing efforts. If you have an email list with a slow dying engagement rate from your VIP customers, try the following ways to gain it back.

Ways to Engage and Retain VIP Customers

1. Grant VIP Customers Early Access to Sales & New Product Launches
2. Create Exclusive Survey Campaigns for VIP Customers
3. Incentivize VIP Customers for Referring Your Products
4. Send Occasional Thank You Emails to VIP Customers
5. Use Advanced Analytics to Boost Personalization

Grant VIP Customers Early Access to Sales & New Product Launches

Making people feel special can go a long way in establishing long-term relationships. So if you’re planning to launch a new product or roll out a season-special sale, create an insider segment to inform your VIPs first of these events. Email them a day before or give them early access to sales.

When you execute this step, ensure you make the VIPs know that they are the ones receiving this privilege. Just like Amazon Prime members get early access to certain sale events, you can make your VIP customers get something similar. The more special you make your VIPs feel, the better.

Create Exclusive Survey Campaigns for VIP Customers

Haven’t heard from your VIP customers lately? Fret not! You can reignite the lost engagement rate by sending them engaging emails containing survey forms. Since the VIPs are the ones who have made most purchases, they understand your products better. When you seek peoples’ suggestions, they feel valued.

So planning survey campaigns can have two benefits. The first is making your loyal customers feel heard, and the second is fetching valuable reviews that can be used to better the product, service, and overall business operations. You can use tools like Survey Monkey to design visually appealing and interactive survey forms.

Incentivize VIP Customers for Referring Your Products

Everyone loves receiving discounts, gift vouchers, free delivery on their next order, or a free sample product from their favorite brands. What if you could use this to generate more sales and make more brand loyalists? Well, it is doable. All you need to do is strategically develop a lucrative referral offer that gives people a reason to share your favorite products in their network.

The incentive can be anything that lures the reader to hit the share button. You can dig into the previous purchase patterns of your VIP customers and see what prompted them to make the previous purchases. Was it a special discount you were running, a BOGO deal, or something else? You can create multiple personalized referral email segments based on their purchase patterns and personal preferences to ensure the campaign has a high engagement and success rate.

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Send Occasional Thank You Emails to VIP Customers

If your past email marketing strategy included sending too many sales-oriented emails, you should stop now. People don’t like emails that constantly try to sell them something. Continuing with this method can result in people reporting your emails as spam or unsubscribing from your email list.

To ensure you don’t make this mistake, try sending occasional emails thanking them for their patronage. You can either send them a well-crafted thank you email or choose to add a discount code or gift voucher as a way to amplify your message. If you have VIPs with high lifetime customer value, sending them a thank you note with a bit of surprise is best.

They most probably weren’t expecting such emails, and this move can make them purchase more from your business.

Use Advanced Analytics to Boost Personalization

You can only generate a spark with your email communications if they are highly relevant to the recipient. Since VIPs belong to the repeat customers’ category, it is easy to predict what they like and expect. Besides checking their customer profile on your business software, you can also dig past emails sent to them on your email marketing tool to analyze which subject lines or email themes garnered maximum responses from them.

Searching for an advanced analytics tool that gives you a better understanding of your VIPs past behaviors can also be done. Ultimately, you want to craft emails that look like they’re directly talking to the recipient and are of interest to them. If you can pull this successfully with the help of analytics, you’re sure to witness visible results.

Conclusion

You can generate more business with your email list.
Your email list is your biggest asset that no one can snatch away from you. But it takes proper nurturing to maintain the list. If you have a segmented list of loyal customers, you cannot expect them to remain interested in your brand by sending them the same emails you’re sending to your one-time customers.

Repeat customers expect more from your brand, so you must make extra efforts to keep them happy. While there are endless ways to keep an email list engaged in your brand, not every option might work for you. But to make things easier for you, this guide lists all the possible options to help you make the cut.

All you have to do is try out each option listed above, and see what works best for your business. The more A/B test you conduct, the better.

FAQs

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of creating a good relationship between the brand and customers. Customer engagement's main aim is to create brand awareness among targeted customers and make them loyal to your brand.

How do you engage VIP customers?

Different ways to keep your VIP customers engaged are:

• By giving them early access to Sales & New Product Launches
• Offer incentives to VIP Customers for Referring Your Products
• Send occasional Thank You Emails
• Use Personalized emails and offers

What are the best ways for customer engagement?

Some of the best ways for customer engagement are:

• Surveys
• Chatbots
• Emails

What are the types of referral programs?

There are 4 types of Referral Programs for businesses to use:

• Direct referrals
• Implied referrals
• Tangible referrals
• Community referrals