Using customer buying habits to influence your email marketing content strategy

Continuing the story about my long-lasting running sandals, there's another lesson.

Since customers only placed one order per year, it can be difficult to know when they need another pair.

They don't want to go too aggressive on the sales messages or it could burn people out on their company.

In this company's case, they did the best thing possible.

They have a regular email that goes out once or twice a week. In it they highlight stories from their athletes, customers, as well as interesting content that is relevant to the audience (e.g. trail reports). Every now and then there are soft sales message or product announcements.

This light-touch keeps them top-of-mind for the 50 weeks of the year a customer doesn't need new sandals so when it's time to buy, they're there and the relevant choice.

If your customers also have long cycles in-between purchases, this content heavy approach can work well. You can sprinkle in your products now and then, and have a few product launches throughout the year.

To find out the actual buying cycles of your customers, you'll need to do a data analysis called a Customer Purchase Latency.

You can do it by hand if you love spreadsheets, vlookup, and pivot tables.

Or you can install Repeat Customer Insights and have it run that analysis for you.

Eric Davis