Build Customer Relationships with Newsletter & Social Listening

6 min read

If you want to become a successful company, you should aim to build long-term customer relationships. Once your customer has made a purchase, don’t stop learning what they need. Moreover, you should make sure you provide added value which is engaging at the same time. While it might sound easier said than done, this blog post will show you how to build meaningful customer relationships with social monitoring tools and newsletters.

How to Build Strong Relationships with Clients

1. Listen to customers.

Set up a social monitoring tool.

A small percentage of tweets contain a company handle when they refer to a specific company. Make sure you allow for it and get a social monitoring tool that will keep you up to date and help you cut down on unnecessary social media usage. Stay on track & have a tool that will help you monitor forums and news articles at the same time.

Thanks to the mentions feed feature, you can see what people are saying about your company in real time. Once you’ve identified influencers with the influence score feature, you will be able to prioritize conversations. And finally, make sure you set up email notifications for product names and/or your company and you’re good to go.

One social listening tool you can try out now is Brand24. If you feel like taking it for a spin, try Brand24 trial. It’s completely free.

Set up a social monitoring tool.

Harness the power of newsletters.

While social monitoring tools are great, you can’t forget about Internet users who aren’t active on social media. Or about people who don’t have social media accounts at all.

To put things in perspective, there are 3.42 billion Internet users out there. To this date, there are 1.79 billion Facebook and 4.35 email accounts.

How to get the most out of the newsletter experience? Choose a newsletter provider with advanced reporting tools. Email statistics tell you a lot, for example, what is the open rate (how many people opened the newsletter), CTR rate (how many users clicked on the link) and where did people click within the newsletter.

2. Outline an engagement plan.

Before you can come up with a great plan, you need to do some research. Here’s what you should find out about your customer as far as social media listening is concerned:

  • Which social media channel is the most favorable one among your customers?
  • Which products and/or services do they talk about?
  • Do they consistently praise or complaint about a specific product or service?
  • What types of content do they usually share?

Social listening provides an effective way to get to know your audience better. For example, Brand24 provides various data that is crucial to learning about your audience’s habits, such as social media reach, sources of traffic, number of interactions and more. Here’s what you need to know about social media analysis done by Brand24.

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When it comes to newsletters, different metrics are used to outline an action plan.

  • Where does the traffic come from?
  • What does usually lead to conversions?
  • How could you use current trends in the email marketing campaigns?
  • What are the best email open times?

The good news about newsletters is that you can send mass email that appears personalized… if you set up newsletter automation.

3. Execute plan with these tools.

Set up a social monitoring tool.

With your social media channels, things are pretty straightforward. You either respond to a happy/angry post or your company website or go to a person’s profile and craft a witty/helpful response.

And here’s the response from Tesco:

Set up a social monitoring tool.

As far as newsletters are concerned, people still associate them with spam emails sent out at random. While there are certainly spammers out there, your newsletters can be pretty personalized if you use marketing automation skillfully. Listen to BrandTalks with Adel de Meyer on marketing automation.

Here’s what you could do to up the personalization game:

*Contact Segmentation

Create a customer list for every single shared identifying trait your subscribers might have. That could be purchase history, gender and location. With this tool, you will manage customer relationships with ease.

Thanks to contact segmentation, you won’t be sharing random content and hope that people will open your emails & won’t get annoyed by updates they are not interested in. Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. 

You can clearly see that sharing relevant content is easy and guarantees that you will build long-term customer relationships with newsletters. Once you’ve segmented your contacts…

*Use Trigger Emails

While Facebook bots don’t really cut it, using trigger emails is a completely different story. They are sent out after a customer displays a particular behavior for example abandons a shopping cart. They make your customer think that you actually took a lot of time and thought to create the email. In reality, this will take you only a few minutes.

Since it’s a timely campaign, trigger-based emails translate into higher open rates. They relate to a situation your subscriber was in and they are a natural step in your customer’s journey. Autoresponder campaigns get twice the average open rate when compared to conventional newsletters. They are customized based on the data your contact shared on the signup page/form. Therefore, it is important that you ask for desired data in the form and then go for contact segmentation.

*Utilize Autoresponders

Autoreponders are also automated emails. Below you will find the most common autoresponders examples to get you going.

  • Welcome email
  • Product recommendation
  • Birthday email
  • Product opinion email
  • Re-engagement email
  • Date/time triggered email
  • Download confirmation email

While blatant sales newsletters might scare your customers off, autoresponders would be always welcome, because they are timely emails with a purpose. After all, who wouldn’t want to treat themselves on their birthday?  

*Utilize Autoresponders

4. Offer a rewards program.

Now that you know what how to engage your customers, you should identify and later embrace your active advocates. They happen to be revenue-drivers and do your job for you, acquiring new customers, so it’s worth a shot.

Create a special email list and surprise them with exclusive offers, sales sneak peek, and events curated especially for them. You don’t need to spend much time on that once you activate trigger emails.

The easiest reward to give is a heavy discount on items they enjoy getting (check out their purchase history before sending an email). To deepen the relationship, hold an event that’s organized only for your most loyal customers: that could be an invitation to a new collection launch, Christmas event – it really depends what is the nature of your business. Like everyone else, loyal customers love to get involved. If you’re working on a new product, let them test it and give you feedback. Keep the momentum going by giving them a special deal after the product has been finally launched.

5. Stay up-to-date with recent trends.

Utilize social listening to learn what is your audience interested in. Discover what’s trending among your customer base and in your industry. See what are your competitors up to – have they developed a new product? Don’t forget to learn about the latest events, tools, strategies and latest gadgets. Then, set up appropriate alerts and content creation for social media and the newsletter becomes a piece of cake.

Here’s how you can follow recent trends by following your influencers.

Author Bio:
Stefania Goldman is a passionate storyteller at Newsletter2Go. She lives and breathes all things technology.

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