Can Hosted Email Boost Your Customer Engagement and Brand Revenue?

Customer loyalty is a tricky thing. Especially in the telecom and hosting provider industries. You work hard to convince customers that your service is better than that your competitors’ (which can be difficult and expensive). You do your best to offer the products and services that your customers want, at a price they are willing to pay. Market research, another thing, another thing. . . and still your churn rates are high. It’s frustrating.

But what if there’s been a simple solution that has been hiding in plain sight all along?

What if you could improve customer loyalty, engagement and revenue by providing (and proactively promoting) an email service?

 

 

How Providing a Simple Service Can Triple Customer Stickiness

atmail has worked with a lot of telecom companies and hosting providers over the years – and whilst each company reports unique anecdotes, there are some common trends we’ve picked up on recently:

1. The first, is that some companies see email as a legacy service and don’t pay much attention to growing their email offering or tapping into its real potential; and

2. The second, the more exciting one, is that other companies are seeing a direct and tangible correlation between email usage and increased customer spend.

But, isn’t email dead?

No. Far from it. Expanding on from the anecdotes we’re hearing, one large telco told us that they validated their anecdote with internal research that proved for them that customers who used their email service would spend (on average) three times as much per customer across all services than customers who did not use their email.

So, by providing one simple service (free of charge, in their case), that telco (which sits in an industry that is notorious for low customer satisfaction ratings and high churn) tripled the stickiness of their customers! This is an incredible result that is sure to put a smile on any cost-conscious CIO.

Building on from this, that telco now deliberately drives email signups and is reporting 10,000 new email customers a month!

You just can’t ignore results like that.

Nor can you ignore the fact that loyal customers are up to fourteen times more likely to buy from than potential new customers. That’s a staggering number, and it makes you think very carefully about the real value of sticky customers.

Don’t get me wrong here; if you’re lagging behind in the standard measures of customer experience, offering email isn’t going to help. You still need to do all the other things that drive customer loyalty. You need to provide best-in-class customer service and meet the needs of your customers more fully than your competitors.

But if you’re already doing everything you can to increase loyalty and reduce churn, offering email services can help boost your engagement—and with that, your revenue.

And offering something that everyone needs – such as email – is a great customer service practice. If you can offer it for free, even better.

 

How Offering Hosted Email Can Increase Engagement and Brand Revenue

Adding value to your regular selling proposition is a great way to make your offer more appealing to customers. If you’re a telco or service provider, offering free hosted email is a reliable and logical bet – we’ve seen it work over and over – and the results speak for themselves.

Thinking bigger picture, it’s not just hosted email that increases customer loyalty and stickiness. Any basic service that your customers need could add value to your existing product lines, because people need those services. They draw potential customers in and – if done well – keep customers loyal (and potentially inspire them to tell their friends).

But, what’s special about email, compared to other value-add service offerings, is that email gives you multiple contact points. Even if a person only checks their email twice a day, that’s two times a day that they could see your website and branding (and any promotions you might run inside your email platform). In addition, you also have access to an email list (to market your products) that includes all of those customers. So, sending one marketing email a week to your customers, or even one marketing email a month, gives you direct access to them without having to go through the process of getting their contact information with a content upgrade or a newsletter subscription. After all, no other digital channel gives you such direct access to your customer’s inbox.

Summing up, if you like the idea of offering hosted email but it seems like an expense your business cannot afford, think again. If email could increase the purchasing potential of your existing customers by 300% across all of your portfolio products, can you really afford not to offer email?

 

Written by Dann Albright, with Andrea Martins