How to Use Email & SMS to Increase Retention for a Wellness Brand

Key Takeaways

• Retention is where wellness brands win. Email and SMS keep customers engaged long after the first purchase.
• Lifecycle marketing works best when Email and SMS are used together to support education, trust, and timely nudges.
• Segmentation and personalization turn generic messaging into relevant experiences that increase lifetime value.
• Onboarding, refill reminders, and product education reduce churn by helping customers get real results from their purchases.
• Automation allows wellness brands to deliver timely, personalized messages at scale without adding manual workload.
• Data from Email and SMS campaigns reveals what drives repeat purchases, helping brands refine retention strategies over time.

The wellness industry is competitive, and you have to hustle to bring in new customers.

Wellness brands can keep the conversation going and increase retention when they use SMS and email as a core strategy. This focus on lifecycle marketing, in which wellness brands engage customers at every stage of the relationship, is central to building lifelong customers.

Learn how adding email and SMS marketing to your wellness brand toolkit will increase customer retention and improve your bottom line.

Wellness Brand Marketing Challenges: How Email and SMS Can Help

The wellness industry is one of the fastest-growing segments of the economy. Americans spend $500 billion each year, with an expected 5% annual growth. And like every burgeoning market, competition is fierce. But rival brands aren’t your only challenge.

Wellness brands have an uphill battle when it comes to building trust with their audience. The wellness space is rife with misinformation and questionable products. Even doctors are skeptical, with medical training sometimes focusing more on treating disease than preventing it.

Wellness brand marketing that wins focuses on educating existing customers and earning their trust.

SMS and email campaigns are ideal marketing tools for the job.

Email is hotter than ever, pulling in three times more purchases than social media marketing.

And SMS retention? Text messages have a 98% open rate, and 67% of recipients are more interested in a product after receiving a text message about it.

Segment the Audience

Send customers information and products that are most important to them. Your customer list is made up of people with varying characteristics. Income, age, and gender are just a few of the attributes that influence what people buy.

SMS and email marketing make it easy to group your customers by their traits. Sending them information about products they're likely to be interested in will keep them coming back to your website, ultimately increasing their lifetime value.

Onboard Customers

Teach them how to get the most from their purchases. You have outstanding wellness products. But how well customers use them will influence their effectiveness.

Sending them tutorials and videos will ensure your products perform at full strength, while also encouraging consumers to purchase related items. Videos demonstrating a nightly skin-care routine or recipes using your protein powder will reinforce your products’ value and increase customer confidence.

Provide Personalized Recommendations

Nudge them into making their next purchase by making personalized recommendations based on their purchase and browsing history. If knowledge is power, then the data you already have about your customers is your strength, particularly when it comes to their purchase history.

SMS and email retention work by introducing your customers to products closely related to those they’ve already purchased. Encourage them to pair the calming fragrances they already have with stress balls or a diffuser. Send them a link to your sunrise alarm clock to go with the herbal-melatonin blend they just received.

Send Updates and Refill Reminders

Keep your products on their minds with updates and refill reminders. Even your most enthusiastic customers get sidetracked by life’s many distractions.

You can help them out by sending shipping and delivery notifications. Use email and SMS retention to nudge them to sign up for subscriptions or order refills.

Reduce Customer Churn With Personalization and Automation

Send email and SMS messages automatically at exactly the right time. Wellness brands can engage their customers and personalize messages without spending hours on labor.

An all-in-one platform client like Privy can automatically send messages when consumers perform triggering actions or even non-actions.

Send welcome messages when consumers sign up or thank-you messages when they complete a purchase. Increase retention by reminding them of items in an abandoned cart. You can even set up an automatic message for customers who haven’t purchased in a set amount of time.

Automated and personalized messages do the heavy lifting of customer outreach, increasing customer retention and lifetime value.

Use Data to Target Wellness Brand Marketing

Let data inform your email and SMS retention strategies. As you send SMS and email marketing messages, you’ll be able to use your results to craft more effective campaigns The data will be even more informative if you use an all-in-one tool. Over time, you’ll know important information, such as:

• Best send times and days
• Revenue per subscriber
• Open rates, broken down by demographic
• ROI for each campaign

Turn First-Timers Into Long-Term Customers

There’s never been a better time to be in the wellness industry. But wellness brands have to work harder than ever to rise above the noise. When you land customers, keep them with a proven retention strategy using SMS and email.

Email and SMS retention are effective marketing strategies that are proven to turn one-time customers into loyal fans of your wellness brand. Using these tips will ensure your marketing campaigns hit the mark. And using Privy will ensure you have access to the features and data you need in one easy-to-use platform.

Ready to turbo-charge your email and SMS marketing efforts? Start your free Privy trial today and see how the most effective marketing channels can win you lifelong customers.