Customer Retention Emails: 10 Tips & 8 Best Practices
Did you know that customer acquisition costs 5 times more than retaining the existing audience? Of course, attracting new clients is essential for any business, but keeping your current customers loyal and happy is imperative for long-term success.
That’s where retention emails come to help! These messages can light up the spark and remind the clients why they chose you in the first place. And today, we’ll break down the best practices to make customer retention emails work for you!
What’s So Special About Retention Emails
Customer retention campaigns cover everything from abandoned cart follow-ups and birthday shoutouts to product recommendations and serve to keep the interaction active. While acquisition emails are busy attracting new clients, retention emails focus on people who’ve already interacted with your brand: for example, signed up or made a purchase.
They are a powerful tool that can make your marketing approach fresh and appealing. Specifically, retention emails can influence 2 key business metrics:
- Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). The longer and more engaged existing customers are, the more revenue they bring. And all this without the high costs of acquiring new customers!
- Decrease Customer Churn. It hurts to lose clients, but high-quality and well-timed retention emails can rekindle interest, remind the readers why they love your brand, and keep them from drifting away.
5 Key Actions for Effective Retention Campaigns
Though crafting excellent emails is vitally important, it’s just one part of a strong customer retention strategy. Keep an eye on these 5 essentials before, during, and after your campaign to ensure its success:
- Segment your audience. Not all customers are the same, so treat them appropriately! Segment the subscribers based on their shopping habits, demographics, or past interactions to deliver highly relevant emails every time.
- Monitor engagement metrics. Open rates, click-through rates, and conversions will tell you what’s working and what requires attention. If engagement is tanking, it’s a sign to tweak your content, timing, or targeting.
- Optimize send frequency. Too many emails can cause unsubscribes, while too few might make you slip off the radar. Find the right balance between staying top-of-mind and becoming a digital nuisance. For this, test different frequency options to see what your audience prefers best and put it to work.
- Analyze unsubscribe data. Average unsubscribe rates for many industries can reach up to 1–2%. But if you’re facing higher numbers, this calls for investigation. Are your emails too frequent? Or maybe irrelevant? Dig into the data and make the necessary adjustments.
- Keep your email list clean. A bloated list full of inactive subscribers and invalid addresses is bad news for your sender reputation. Regularly clean it up to keep deliverability high and ensure you’re reaching people who actually want to hear from you.
How Blocks Makes Retention Email Creation a Breeze
Designing and writing customer retention emails requires both skills and an appropriate tool to complement them. Blocks, our intuitive drag-and-drop email builder, empowers anyone to create stunning templates with ease — even if you’re not a coding expert!
Getting started is simple: sign up using your email or Google account, and you’re ready to roll! From there, you have 2 options.
Build an Email from Scratch
It’s a perfect place to start if you want full creative control. Log into your account, create a new project, and hit the “Create a new email” button.
Next, choose the “Blank template” option.
The canvas is yours! Effortlessly add and arrange blocks and elements, fill them with content, link important pages, and fine-tune every detail in your customer retention email templates to match your vision and brand’s style.
Customize a Predesigned Template
Pressed for time or need a little inspiration? Skip the blank page struggle and browse our extensive Template gallery! Explore a variety of professionally designed templates sorted by email type, industry, and purpose. Pick the one that fits your needs and follow straight to customization.
After that, it’s time to turn the template into your own masterpiece! Edit text, swap images, adjust colors, and modify any element you want to bring your creative ideas to life.
150+ professional templates for you!
150+ professional templates for you!
8 Best Practices for Retention Emails
And now, let’s take your email marketing strategy to the next level! Here are 8 email ingredients to help you retain customers effectively and with style.
Personalization: The Key to Winning Hearts
Stats show that personalized emails boast an impressive 29% open rate and a 41% click-through rate. Why is that? Because we all love to feel special and are more likely to engage with the brand when it speaks directly to us.
Start with mentioning the recipient’s name either in the subject line or the email body (or both!) to instantly make your message feel more personal. And then dive even deeper using customers’ previous purchases, abandoned carts, or browsing history to create tailored recommendations or highly personalized reminders.
Here’s a great retention email example by Better Brand that addresses the reader, reminds them about the abandoned cart, and offers free shipping.
Valuable Content: Make Every Email Worth Opening
When people open your emails, they’re looking for something that enhances their experience. To keep customer satisfaction sky-high, your content should always be valuable. This is one of the most important aspects that turns retention campaigns into small gems and makes customers excited to hear from you.
Value isn’t limited to personalized discounts or exclusive perks! Share useful tips, expert guides, or insights that may actually help your audience. When the content you deliver makes the lives of your customers better in some way, they’ll see your brand as a go-to source they can trust.
For instance, this email by Rocket Lawyer provides a list of useful articles on a number of legal matters.
Strong Call-to-Action: Turn Clicks Into Conversions
A great retention email is only as powerful as the action it inspires. Whether you want recipients to shop, read an article, or provide customer feedback, your CTA becomes the bridge to guide the audience in the right direction.
But how do you create CTAs that deliver results?
- Stick to one clear, primary button. If you provide readers with too many choices at once, they might end up doing nothing at all. Yet if you need more CTAs, make sure they fit organically and don’t compete for attention.
- Make it impossible to miss. A CTA should pop off the screen! Use contrast colors, eye-catching fonts, and a size that stands out. Remember: if your reader has to search for the next step, your CTA isn’t strong enough.
- Fill it with a desire for action. Use FOMO-triggering language that conveys urgency and exclusivity. Spice it up with time-sensitive phrases like “Ends Tonight” or “Only a Few Left” to create even more excitement.
One of the best customer retention email examples is provided by EXOH. It features one main CTA and secondary buttons that do their job without stealing the spotlight.
Human-Centric Message: For Extra Authenticity
It’s nearly impossible to emotionally connect with a stiff, robotic sales pitch. If you want to retain customers for long, your brand needs to feel real: show personality, authenticity, and warmth.
Here are 3 ways to breathe soul into your retention campaigns:
- Keep it light, keep it natural! Short sentences, friendly tone, and human language make your emails feel like a conversation and not a corporate memo.
- Go for a little appreciation to turn a one-time buyer into a brand ambassador. A simple “Thanks for being part of our community!” or “We’re so grateful for you” can go a long way in building customer loyalty.
- Add a bit of transparency and let your readers see the faces behind the emails. Share team photos and behind-the-scenes moments, or craft messages as if they’re coming straight from the company representatives.
Mode Chocolate brings a fantastic example here with a lighthearted, playful message infused with the brand’s signature type of humor.
Lifecycle Triggers: Perfect Timing, Every Time
When your messages align with a customer’s actions or journey map, they naturally feel welcomed. Make your retention emails an organic part of your customer’s journey with the help of behavioral and lifecycle triggers!
- Start your retention strategy with a post-purchase experience. A warm thank-you email, helpful product guides, or an exclusive discount for a future purchase keeps the excitement alive and reinforces trust.
- Celebrating milestones, such as sign-up anniversaries or birthdays, adds a personal touch that makes the recipients feel valued.
- If a customer has gone quiet, don’t just wave goodbye! Craft a win-back email to remind them of past favorites, introduce exciting new products, or offer an incentive that simply can’t be ignored.
For example, this email by Busuu invites the reader to celebrate their 3-month anniversary with the brand and receive a discount.
Customer Feedback: Engagement, the Fun Way
People like to share their opinions, and retention emails are the perfect way to check in with the customers. But, of course, your job is to make it easy and enjoyable: not too many readers would want to slog through a long, boring survey.
Ditch the endless forms and go for one-click polls or interactive quizzes that feel more like a game than a task. And to make it more worthwhile, offer a little bonus: discounts, loyalty points, or an entry into a giveaway. Even a small reward can make customers feel valued and keep them coming back for more.
Here’s a superb example by Miro that invites users to take a small survey with a chance to win a prize for participation.
Social Media Links: Amp Up Community Engagement
One more vital part of retention strategy is keeping your brand top of mind even when current customers aren’t shopping. That’s exactly where social media and community engagement shine! When clients follow, interact, and share, they naturally become your biggest brand advocates.
Invite the audience to subscribe to your social media, but instead of a simple “Follow us”, give them a reason to join. For this, use catchy promos that offer something of value, like “Be the first to see new drops — follow us on X!” or “Join us on Instagram for a chance to win!”.
Tens shows a fine example with this email that invites readers to follow the brand on Instagram.
Consistency: Stay Familiar and Welcomed
Isn’t it awesome when your brand is instantly recognizable without the need to check the sender’s name? Consistency is more than just sending emails on a regular schedule (though that’s also important!). It’s about maintaining your very own voice and identity in every message you send.
Aside from the tone of voice, let’s not forget about visual consistency. Brand-specific colors, fonts, and design elements create a smooth, cohesive experience that mirrors your website and other marketing touchpoints, making every email feel familiar yet fresh.
A fantastic example comes from Bored Cow which keeps its emails consistent, be it a product promo, a recipe, or an announcement.
5 Don’ts for Retention Email Campaigns
Effective retention emails are a formidable tool to improve customer satisfaction. But along with best practices, it’s important to know about missteps that may drive clients away instead.
Below are 5 “don’ts” to remember when developing a retention campaign:
1. Don’t use clickbait subject lines. Of course, subject lines must be catchy, but not misleading. If your email doesn’t deliver on its promise, even the most loyal customers may lose trust, resulting in high unsubscribe rates.
2. Don’t overuse sales pitches. If every email screams “Buy now!”, customers will eventually start tuning out. Mix promotions with other interesting and useful content to give your audience a reason to stay on board beyond just discounts.
3. Don’t ignore mobile optimization. With a majority of users checking emails on their phones, a poorly formatted campaign can lead to frustration and quick deletions. Use a responsive design and test your messages across different devices before sending them.
Thanks to Blocks, you can design mobile-friendly emails hassle-free. Craft responsive templates in our builder, preview them instantly, and fine-tune every detail to achieve best results.
4. Don’t use too much text. When readers see a wall of text, they’re more likely to close the email and move on without paying much attention to it. Keep the campaigns concise: use bullet points, short paragraphs, and get to the core of your message quickly.
5. Don’t hide your unsubscribe option. An easy-to-find unsubscribe link builds trust and helps you maintain a healthier, more engaged email list. On the flip side, making it hard to opt out frustrates users and may increase spam complaints.
Conclusion
Great customer retention emails do more than just drive repeat purchases. They nurture connections and amplify customer experience. With the right approach (and tools like Blocks to make email creation effortless), your retention campaigns will become a powerful vehicle for long-term growth.
So why wait? Armed with this guide, you’re ready to craft templates that will make your customer retention email strategy as impactful as it can be. Good luck!