Without customers, you have no business, so make sure you celebrate them often.

Celebrating your customers has real benefits: it displays appreciation and acknowledgement (bonus points for incorporating personalization) and highlights the value of your product or service – all of which go a long way in increasing customer retention.

Celebrating customers can look different from business to business. For ecommerce businesses, celebrating customers’ birthdays is a quick win. A birthday email can include a discount code or a free gift, and performance of such emails is typically high compared promotional emails (342% higher revenue, according to Experian).

For B2B/SaaS businesses, customer celebration looks a little different. It’s more about celebrating usage milestones, activities and wins within the product and/or service. By helping customers to realize the value in – and their reliance on – your product, you will drastically reduce churn risk.

4 ways to celebrate your customers – with templates

If you want to celebrate your customers but aren’t sure where to start, below are four ideas, complete with the data points you need to collect and the templates you should use.

1. Yearly activity summary

Remind customers how much worth they are getting from your product and/or service by sending them an email that summarizes all of the product actions they have taken throughout the year.

For example, a file hosting SaaS might highlight the number of files a user has sent and received to remind them how much they rely on the product. A screen recording software could tally up the number of recorded minutes or number of replays. An eLearning tool course could show how many hours of learning the user has completed. All of this data should be easy to retrieve from your product.

Below is an example of how language learning tool Duolingo shows value realization.

The email highlights the customer’s usage of the product, and boosts engagement by incorporating elements of gamification (e.g. points earned, streak counts, new words learned, etc.).

If you want to celebrate your customers’ product usage, Ortto’s Yearly activity recap email template is a great place to start.

You can easily personalize the template using our JSON endpoint feature, which allows you to add dynamic content fields into emails. When adding dynamic content, you can choose whether to request data once per campaign or once per contact. The former would suit a newsletter email that shows the most used features or most popular content, for example, but the once per contact request type would suit an email that celebrates a customer’s product usage, as you can choose to pull the data points that are relevant to the individual who receives the email. Find out more about adding dynamic content here.

2. Celebrate customer milestones

When a customer reaches a high level of usage within your product and/or service, be sure to shout about it.

Fitness app Fitbit does this well by letting users know when they have completed a number of steps or earned a training badge.

This type of email affirms the customer and increases the likelihood that they will continue to use Fitbit to track their training efforts.

To incorporate emails like this into your own customer retention strategy, use Ortto’s Celebrate customer milestones template. You can set it up using custom activities from your CDP and the data you collect from your app to provide a personalized and timely user experience.

3. Feedback appreciation

Customer feedback is incredibly valuable to any business , but it’s not always easy to get. So, when a customer does go out of their way to provide feedback, let them know that you appreciate their time.

Ortto’s feedback appreciation template is designed to thank a customer for feedback. It is simple and effective, and easy to personalize using merge tags (e.g. first name) and custom activities (e.g. the type of feedback they provided).

4. Thank customers for their contribution to your business

Celebrate your customers by letting them know that you couldn’t do what you do without their support.

Australian brand Zero Co, who are aiming to eliminate single-use plastic, shine a light on the collective achievements of its customers in furthering their environmental initiative, which creates a sense of community (and, in turn, engagement). See below.

Ortto’s Year in review email template is designed to do just this. With this template, you can share the successes of your business and explicitly thank your customers for the role they have played in that success. Or, you can share the success of your customers’ businesses, and highlight your role in that success.

Final word

With Ortto’s templates, you can easily automate the celebration of your customers. Simply select a template, add in the data, turn it on, and know that your customers are continually receiving the appreciation they deserve. Check out our templates directory by signing up or signing in today.