Now that the holiday season is over and we are all getting back into the normal swing of things, a lot of digital marketing folks are beginning to look at their email marketing lists and trying to figure out how to winback some customers who haven’t engaged with them a while. This is a common challenge across the industry, and I have heard many different recommendations from a number of experts in the field.
There are a number of steps you can take to prep for these types of programs and help ensure a successful campaign to win back your customers. While the creative and actual messaging is essential for a successful program, it’s important to remember that all your efforts in those areas won’t matter one bit if you don’t put in the effort on the front end.
These three steps will help you prepare for this year’s big win-back campaign.
1. Determine What an Inactive Customer Means to You
If you’re advising a client on a winback program, don’t make the common mistake of making suggestions before you completely understanding their business model. It is extremely important to carefully examine their customer lifecycle and go backwards.
I will often hear experts say that if someone hasn’t opened or clicked on a message in 3 to 6 months (or some other arbitrary date range), you should simply remove them from your list. While this might be a decent starting point for the masses, I believe you could be missing out on some valuable customers. Let’s say for example that you send a monthly newsletter. Are you only going to give the person three opportunities to engage with you before you start asking them to come back? In their minds, maybe they never left and were just busy working on some high-level projects that prevented them from focusing on the information you have sent them.
2. Examine the Content You Are Sending Them
If there’s one term that has been repeatedly drilled into my head more than any other in the many years I’ve been in this industry, it’s “relevancy.” If you are not sending your customers relevant offers and information, how can you expect them to be engaged with your brand and marketing campaigns? Take a look back at the last 6-12 months and see if your campaigns are still offering your customers something that they can’t get somewhere else. Is the information that you are sharing with them meaningful and important to them, or are you simply sending everyone the same offers with no regard for past engagement?
3. Don’t Send Win-Back Emails from the Same System as Your “Master” List
One of the most important things to think about and prepare for when creating a re-engagement campaign is to make sure you have a separate IP for sending these messages. Because of the nature of the campaign, you are likely to see a higher than usual unknown user and complaint rate. By creating a separate sub-domain and sending off of a separate IP, you are less likely to negatively affect the rest of your email marketing messages.
After you’ve taken the three steps above, it is time to focus on the messaging, creative and potential special offers you are going to employ to get your customers engaged with your brand again. Remember, doing the work on the frontend will save you time and agony on the backend.
One final note: when creating a re-engagement program, make sure to not overwhelm your customers with too many messages. If they have already become inactive for whatever reason, continuing to send them more and more mail is not going to get them to come back. In fact it will likely cause them to mark all of your messages as spam, which would be worse than simply losing them as a customer.
A well-planned and executed winback campaign is certainly worth the effort, and these three steps will help get you started.
Good Luck and Good Sending.
Last 5 posts by Spencer Kollas
- Welcome and Confirmation Messages: The Forgotten Email Opportunities - April 30th, 2012
- Calling All Deliverability Experts - March 16th, 2012
- My Two Pillars of Email Deliverability - February 16th, 2012
- Earn the Respect of Your Customers with Teamwork - December 15th, 2011
- Making Sense of Email Marketing Metrics - November 14th, 2011
