As challenging as it is to build a business and develop relationships with customers, there are remarkable achievements during this journey that need to be celebrated. And there isn’t a more suitable medium to do that than emails.
Milestone email is designed purely for that purpose. Those emails are an excellent opportunity to strengthen the company’s relationships with your customers by sending highly personalized and engaging messages. Thus, it’s important to keep in mind personalized emails provide six times higher transaction rates compared not personalized ones.
What is milestone email, and why do businesses need them
Keeping your existing customers loyal is the main struggle that companies have. It is also a crucial factor for business growth. But companies that realize the power of customer data, and use it successfully, can build long-lasting relationships with their customers․ This is true for milestone emails, as companies collect data to craft targeted messages.
Businesses send milestone emails to their email recipients for special occasions like:
- Customers birthday
- Company milestones
- The anniversary of a customer buying from you
- Product anniversaries
- Year in review
Today customers expect to receive personalized messages that are also relevant. In this process, this kind of email plays a significant role as they create a strong connection between a brand and a customer. By sending these emails, brands express how much they value their customers. Thanks to this and other reasons, milestone emails can be beneficial and help businesses to accomplish several goals:
✔ Improve customer engagement
These emails are a great solution for brands who are trying to increase customer engagement. Moreover, it’s possible to re-engage passive customers thanks to celebratory email.
✔ Increase conversion
Although the main goal of milestone emails is not to promote products, they are also an effective tactic to offer special deals to customers for their birthdays.
✔ Builds a community
Sending messages that remind customers of the value you share and taking time to celebrate those accomplishments creates a sense of community. In this way, your customers will become brand advocates and refer your products to their friends and online audience.
In order to make your milestone email campaign effective, it’s helpful to start by setting clear goals. In the next step, businesses should focus their efforts on accomplishing those goals. For writing birthday emails, they should collect customers’ birthdays or birthday months using subscription forms. But for sending anniversary emails, companies should have users’ purchase information and subscription dates.
And in case they want to include special offers in the messages, then they should send it beforehand, like a few days or weeks prior, so email subscribers will have the opportunity to take action.
Different types of milestone emails that companies can send to their customers
Occasions that companies need to celebrate are different; for that reason, they need to send various kinds of milestone emails. In addition to that, customers may be in a different stage of the customer cycle, and this fact also makes it important to send a wide range of emails that celebrate milestones. Next, we are going to discuss different types of milestone emails and their defining characteristics.
Birthday Emails
Celebrating a customer’s special day is a great idea for increasing customer engagement. This type of email is quite popular. The study has shown that open rates for birthday emails are over three times higher than for promotional messages that have been sent to the same email recipients.
The first step is collecting data on customers’ dates of birth. For that, when building a subscription form for building your email list, offer people to share their date of birth.
As we mentioned, when creating a celebratory email, some companies do not have a marketing goal. They just send festive and cheerful messages to celebrate their customers. Others decide to use this opportunity to increase their sales.
Businesses should do this process strategically because if an email sounds too pushy, the customer may ignore the offer. Instead, it’s important to keep the joyful tone and offer customers discounts and special offers to make the day even more festive. Following these tactics, businesses can achieve two goals: increase customer loyalty and drive conversions.
Company and product anniversary emails
Many brands give importance to celebrating their company’s anniversary with customers sending emails to them. Although the context of those messages is about businesses’ achievements, brands should try to put customers at the center of the company anniversary emails. Moreover, they should highlight to email recipients that businesses can achieve this level if customers don’t stick with them.
Company achievement emails also provide a chance to educate subscribers about the latest business news and share what changes are going to happen and what new services customers can expect. These emails also give the brand a human face because they reflect the year.
Like in the case of customer birthday emails or anniversary emails, businesses can offer different rewards and unique offers. It should sound more like a gift for customers than a chance to sell something. Instead, exclusive offers indicate that businesses appreciate customers and are happy for the journey that they are going on together.
For many brands, it is important to celebrate not only their anniversaries but also their products and features. These emails also appreciate customers for staying loyal and using them actively. In addition to that, product anniversary informs users about upcoming promotions and creates a buzz around them.
Customer Accomplishment Email
During the customer journey, loyal customers have some accomplishments. In this stage, the company’s job is to thank its customers for staying loyal to them. They need to collect data about when users created an account and started to use the product.
A brand can indicate how those products helped users accomplish a certain goal. More than that, accomplishment emails can encourage customers to continue using the product.
Alongside showing appreciation to customers, these messages can have another goal to drive sales. By offering badges and different incentives, companies can increase customer retention and drive more purchases.
Years in review email
Year-in-review emails, like other types of emails, have the power to increase customer loyalty. When sharing what your company achieved during the year indicates your important role in the industry and represents you as a leader in a market. This is an important factor that makes us choose this company over competitors.
Furthermore, it gives a sense of community because the brand shows that it values its customer’s thoughts and shares with them lessons they learned during the year.
These emails are effective tactics for sharing insights that might not always be relevant or exciting.
Tips on how to write a milestone email that stands out
People’s inboxes are full of messages, and as many companies have the opportunity to collect data, they also send birthday and anniversary emails. And to ensure your email will interest email recipients and bring the benefits that we discussed, you should optimize them with the following steps:
✔ Write catchy and hooking subject lines
This is the most important part of your emails, which should convince people to open and read them. A great subject line should clearly communicate your message and highlight benefits. For birthday emails, congratulate them and share what exclusive offer is waiting for them
✔ Personalize as much as possible
Personalization is a great tactic to make your message high performing. Therefore businesses need to pay attention to their customers purchasing history and offer personalized gifts that target customers’ interests. Don’t forget to provide loyal clients with exclusive offers. Use the customer’s past buying history to cross-sell products they have recently bought.
✔ Have a captivating and compelling CTA
Another vital component for making your email successful is CTA. So when you are looking for tactics on how to write a milestone email, make the CTA visually appealing, so you can highlight using the bold color combination. Don’t forget to add intriguing elements that will make customers take action.
✔ Create a visually captivating email copy
Statistics have shown that, on average, consumers spend ten seconds reading emails that they get from companies. And to grab email recipients’ attention it is vital to add visuals. So don’t hesitate to include GIFs and images in your email copy.
✔ Make your messaging playful
You can create content and encourage them to participate in them to get special gifts. In addition to this, the tone of your message should also be playful and cheerful.
To sum up
Customers are the backbone of success for every type and shape of business. So sharing how valuable they are for your company can bring excellent results. And milestone email gives an amazing opportunity to celebrate achievements and special days with customers.
We defined this type of email and gave reasons why companies should dedicate efforts to creating it. We also dive into its common types and suggest steps that, if you follow, can build long-lasting relationships thanks to this type of email.
