The Customer Appreciation Email: What it Is and Why it Matters

Is your business attracting customers more than ever? Great! But the big question is: what are you doing to keep them? Never before have customer-brand relationships been so essential.

Did you know that customer loyalty is declining? Customers are more likely to switch to companies that provide better customer service. As you shift your focus to customer loyalty, you’ll keep your most valuable business asset.

You can use customer appreciation emails to solidify your customer-brand relationship. Read on to discover what customer appreciation emails are and how they can benefit you. These guidelines will improve your business, increase customer loyalty, and solidify consumer engagement.

What is a customer appreciation email?

Customer appreciation emails nurture emotional connection between your brand and customers. Have you ever gotten a handwritten note from somebody? How did you feel when you got that note? Appreciation emails strive to create those same good feelings.

By acknowledging their worth, you foster feelings such as gratitude, loyalty, and appreciation. Hence, your customers are more likely to have a positive relationship with your company.

Source: Emma

To get continuous business, customer appreciation emails focus on one aspect: hey show gratitude. You can express that gratitude in several ways. Offer exclusive discounts, special gifts, personalized notes, or various offers. These acts, small as they may seem, work together to form a thick cord of loyalty. Your customers become anchored to your business.

A stronger emotional connection means more engagement and loyalty. Increased loyalty contributes to higher customer retention rates. Happy customers also provide more significant publicity through word of mouth. These, in turn, will lead you to higher profits and more business.

Essential aspects of customer appreciation emails

To express gratitude to your customers the right way, you’ll need to understand the essential aspects of appreciation emails. Although customer appreciation emails differ in form, each email utilizes these three aspects:

• Subject line: use words that garner attention and show how much you care for your customers. Consider words and phrases such as “special,” “thank you,” “gift,” and “you.” Make your customers feel like VIPs.
• Appropriate greeting: addressing customers depends on your business and customers. Use the first or full name when addressing customers. If you don’t have their name, it’s appropriate to say, “Thank you.”
• Specifics: always be specific, especially in the first line of text. Make sure that you state the main point you’re trying to make and then follow it up with necessary supporting details. Never add fluff.

Keeping these three important aspects in mind will focus your attention on your customers. As you provide them with the best customer experience, they’ll remain loyal to you. In addition to words, you’ll want to use purposeful pictures and color-templates to convey your message. Illustrations break up the monotony of reading text and help improve engagement.

What does a customer appreciation email look like for my business?

Though every customer appreciation email can be similar in structure, you can use different formatting techniques and styles to personalize your emails. Regardless of which industry you do business in, appreciating customers is an important step to a successful customer base.

1. Ecommerce

Making consumers happy has never been more critical. According to Forbes, “customer experience [has risen] to the top of whether or not the customer will decide to keep doing business with a brand.” One definite way to provide a quality customer experience is through emails that confirm purchases.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Many customers can feel anxious when they buy products, especially if their purchase is online. Clothing might not be the right size, shoes might not fit, and they might even consider canceling their order after making a purchase. Sending a customer appreciation email validates their choice in your product and can help ground any of their concerns.

In addition to calming consumer anxiety, you can use this opportunity to offer discounts and gifts to capitalize on good feelings and engage further business. Provide links to additional products or services. Connect your customers to engaging blogs that you host. Capitalize on the opportunity to drive business and customer loyalty.

2. Retail

Use similar formats as those depicted below to maximize retail opportunities. Follow expressions of gratitude with personable stories, interesting events, and special opportunities to increase loyalty in fans and customers. Customers always appreciate connecting with a face—use that to your advantage.

Source: Emma

These kinds of customer appreciation emails vastly improve public relations and drive more business through word of mouth. Word of mouth can be one of your greatest marketing strategies. Businesses that encourage word of mouth marketing can gain even more publicity than social media. Drive that success through emotional encouragement and validation.

In tandem, you can show sincere gratitude by asking for feedback. Take the time to receive and review comments about worries, troubles, joys, and thankfulness. When you listen to your customers, they feel that your company cares for them. As your company cares for its customers, they’ll care for you.

3. Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations can’t miss the opportunity to utilize customer appreciation emails. Since donations to nonprofits bench on emotion, validate your donator’s feelings. You can’t do what you do without the contributions of donors. Let them know that. Give them a reason to continue donating. Tell donators how valuable their contributions are to the organization and the people that it serves.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Make sure to be specific when referring to a contributor’s donation. There’s no need to detail exactly how and where the donation goes, but you can increase confidence by revealing a personal story like the one involving Luis Lomai above. It’s additionally beneficial to include testimonies from benefactors with personal stories. Doing so extends the gratitude of benefactors to donors through your company—the successful mediator in-between both parties.

4. Agencies

Even if you don’t host events, send customer appreciation emails to your clients to highlight what you’re grateful for and to foster loyalty. Harvard Business Review affirms that extending gratitude passed transactions leads to higher reliability. Expressing gratitude in this light becomes less of a focus on self-interest, and more of a focus on mutually benefiting as a partnership.

Source: Campaign Monitor

Keep in mind that sincerity trumps tactics. Where all else fails, be sincere. Find what makes you grateful to your customers, and convey it. Forge real connections between your brand and your customers, and loyalty will always follow.

We’ve only listed four examples for your benefit, but you can send customer appreciation emails for virtually anything: anniversaries, milestones, special days, holiday announcements, even solely to say “thank you.” Your only limit is your imagination and creativity.

You might have to tailor your email’s wording in some instances. Change your mentality to better appreciate your customers, and you’ll see that showing appreciation goes a long way in increasing customer loyalty, engagement, and business.

How to automate customer appreciation emails

Now, an essential aspect of customer appreciation emails is the ability to respond to user action. You don’t want to send all those gratitude emails on your own. Fortunately, there’s a user-friendly tool that allows you to automate customer appreciation emails based on user interaction.

CM Commerce

CM Commerce offers a gallery with dozens of email workflows. If you don’t know much about email construction, you don’t have to worry. Constructing an email through CM Commerce is as easy as dragging and dropping. You can build a professional email in mere moments that’ll get you the results you need.

Using CM Commerce additionally adds a human touch to your interactions with customers. Where local retail stores have employees and clerks to serve customers and build loyalty, your business can use CM Commerce

Wrap up

In an online world full of different brands and choices, customer appreciation emails serve as a surefire way to increase customer loyalty, engagement, and business. You can use these vital emails to create emotional brand-consumer bonds through expressions of gratitude—namely through words, discounts, and gifts.

Although most appreciation emails follow a similar format and structure, you can customize and apply them in various types of businesses based on your needs and those of your customers. The only limit in application is your imagination.