Small business guide to re-engage lapsed customers through email campaigns
We have all heard the saying “it costs more to find a new customer than keep an existing one.” How much more expensive? This widely varies depending on what article you’re reading, but the point is retention matters. You put all that effort into acquiring them in the first place you don’t want to burn through them.
A re-engagement campaign is a great, often missed opportunity to win-back inactive subscribers or lapsed customers to reignite their interest. This can help you to retain more customers, it is also good practice for keeping your data clean and making sure you’re emailing the right people.
In this blog we will explore audience segmentation, compelling copy, and automation strategies to win-back lapsed customers and increase revenue and retention.
Identifying your lapsed customers
Before jumping into the how let’s take a second to talk about the importance of defining what a lapsed customer means to your small business. There is no right or wrong criteria for this, it is so dependent on your organisation. For example, we have worked for organisations that are high value purchases that you’re only going to make every few years and companies where the value is smaller and frequency of purchase is higher. This is why it is really important for you to establish your own criteria for what “lapsed” means. Here are some things to think about:
How would you define this audience? Are they customers or people that consume your free content (subscribers)?
Your customer criteria for inactivity could include:
Have not made a purchase in x months
And have not opened an email or clicked on an email in 3-6 months
Whereas for people that have subscribed but never purchased your criteria may be:
Have not opened an email or clicked on an email in 3-6 months
It is good to segment customers and subscribers as when you get into the next stage it will help you tailor the message more. Your CRM and email marketing systems can help you to filter or segment these lists.
Setting up an automated journey and email sequence ideas
Create a series of 3-5 email campaigns designed to hook them back into your business. Depending on your email marketing tool, a lot of platforms allow you to set these up as journeys that cuts out some of the manual work you would need to do otherwise. For example, if people click on the previous email campaign you can drop them out of the re-engagement campaign. This saves you from having to set up an additional segment for each email campaign.
Our suggested sequence of emails is:
Email 1: The “We miss you” (gentle check-in): the aim of this email is to acknowledge their absence and remind them why they signed up in the first place. For example, you could share new products, updates, or blogs or thought leadership that might help them.
Email 2: The incentive (the nudge): provide a time-limited offer to drive action and entice them. This could be an exclusive offer, discount code or a perk that creates a sense of urgency.
Email 3: Last chance/Goodbye: this is the final attempt to re-engage them. Our top tip is to keep this message simple. Provide a clear message that they will be unsubscribed unless they click to stay.
Best practice for success
Personalisation is a great way to improve email performance. By personalisation we mean tailoring the email content based on what you know about them. This goes beyond their first name and means leveraging their past purchase behaviour or browsing history. We are going to give you two examples of this:
If your customer has previously purchased e-books from your small business then you might want to tailor suggested products to be around e-readers, e-reader accessories and books that fit the genres they’ve previously purchased.
If they tend to read blog content relating to tips for their small business, why not send them a curated list of resources they might have missed over the last six months.
Compelling subject lines: you need to create something that is going to hook them in and make them want to open your email. Most email platforms give you the opportunity to A/B test different subject lines allowing you to test what works for your audience. Why not, run A/B tests on subject lines that create urgency, curiosity or are personalised? To see what works for your audience.
Think mobile first: when you design your email campaigns. So many of us consume email marketing campaigns on our mobile phones. Therefore, it is a good idea to think with the mentality of mobile first. One of the common mistakes we see people make is having call to action buttons (like your shop now button) to small to make them easy to use or interact with on mobile.
List hygiene: Don’t forget to keep your data clean, remove the unsubscribes or inactive data to maintain a clean and engaged email list.
Measuring your campaign’s intent
Once you’ve set up your campaign you will want to be able to report on the success of it. So here are some key metrics that you might use to gauge success:
Open rates: this is the percent of people who open the email campaign. Don’t be surprised if you see the open rate decrease as you go through the campaign, because you’re reengaging people and you are ending in a position where the data is colder.
Click-through rates: By this we mean the percentage of people who click on a link on your email campaign.
Conversion rate: this is the percentage of people that take the desired interaction. This could be going on to make a purchase with the discount code, or confirm they want to continue to be subscribed to your mailing list.
Our top tip is to analyse and track the results but don’t get to caught up on benchmarks to external companies. Benchmark against your own data, even if this means waiting a few months. We find this creates more valuable conversations to drive improvements.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading or blog about engagement email campaigns. We truly do believe they are a powerful, cost-effective tool for small businesses to retain and build stronger relationships with customers. Hopefully, we have inspired you to start building your own reengagement campaign and if you would like help getting started, please do get in touch.
