E-mail marketers know all about ghosts, those inactive subscribers on your email list whose low engagement rates hurt your click-through rates (CTR) and other metrics, ultimately impacting your franchise business’s growth. One statistic notes that the average email list decays by 25% every year! A re-engagement campaign every few months can win back inactive customers, weed out the ones ghosting you, bolster customer loyalty and keep vital growth metrics on point.
Here are a few reasons to launch a re-engagement campaign and some best practices for crafting an effective re-engagement email marketing strategy.
Healthy Email List Hygiene
Parts of your subscriber list can become stagnant for a variety of reasons. Some subscribers might have signed up for a one-time offer and lost interest without unsubscribing. Others might not have updated their email address, so your messages now land who knows where. Still others might find your messages repetitive, too difficult to read on a mobile device, or irrelevant, adding to inbox overload that they’ll solve by deleting emails or marking them as spam.
Inactive users impact your sender reputation and your overall email deliverability rate. That said, re-engaging existing customers can be more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. After all, even an inactive customer once signed up for your product or service, so you have an existing relationship that just needs some TLC.
We recommend launching a re-engagement campaign after your metrics show inactivity for three to six months. While this depends on your business and industry, you might pinpoint inactive users through low open rates or low click-through rates from open messages.
A successful re-engagement campaign can enhance your brand’s reputation, increase customer involvement, boost social media presence by encouraging interaction and improve your ROI through more sales. It’s important to determine why your users have become inactive, though, so you provide relevant content to win them back.
Designing Re-Engagement Campaigns
Before launching a re-engagement campaign, segment your audience and define clear objectives. You don’t want a scattershot approach. While your ultimate goal is to raise your open rate and CTR, keeping your subscriber list robust, you’ll need different tactics to develop a dialogue.
Here are a few types of emails to connect with users who have stopped engaging with your messages.
- “We’ve Missed You” – Highlight new products to reconnect with subscribers who haven’t engaged with your brand in a certain period of time. Good emails in this vein also sweeten the deal through free shipping or a select discount.
- Incentive-Based Emails – For subscribers in a loyalty program who seem to have gone dark, or even VIPs, offer an exclusive incentive. You also might give people the chance to reactivate their membership through a special offer.
- Seasonal Recommendations – If you’ve noticed an uptick in some subscribers around certain holidays or seasons, provide a taste of what’s ahead, along with a special offer.
- Personalized Product Recommendations – Use your metrics to tailor messages based on a customer’s prior buys, thanking them for their purchases and offering a discount. If you know of a customer’s anniversary with your brand or other milestone, such as their birthday, send them a special deal for that as well.
- Interest- or Location-Based – Depending on your business, you might tailor your emails around a segment of subscribers with certain interests, such as hiking gear, or geographic location (“Our Philadelphia Friends Save Big This Saturday”).
- Update Communication Preferences – A brief email that provides a clear way for customers to update their email preferences shows courtesy and follows the law. It’s also a targeted way to find email addresses that have changed and can be deleted from your list.
- “What You’ve Missed” – For subscribers who haven’t opened your messages, design an email based on their fear of missing out, highlighting what’s in line with their previous tastes.
- “How Can We Help?” – Lastly, there’s no shame in asking customers how to improve. Explain how you hope they’ve had a great experience and invite them to leave a review or complete a brief survey to share their crucial feedback.
For each of these email templates, be sure to craft specific subject lines that communicate value and a clear call to action. Ensure the design is inviting, that it loads on mobile devices and across different platforms – and don’t forget to personalize each message with the subscriber’s name.
