As a small business ourselves, LB Marketing knows that you wear many hats and struggle to keep up with your marketing efforts. We’ve talked about, what we firmly believe to be the best marketing tool, email newsletters, for the past few blog posts, and now we have some facts to face. I know, more work, but this is really important to the overall success of your email marketing efforts.
The average email lists have an annual decay rate of 22% to 30% – that’s people no longer engaging with your emails!
Whether you schedule time monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, and please, at least annually, you’ll need to determine what to do with email addresses that haven’t responded to your efforts. Based on your platform, you’ll be able to determine if the address is no longer valid or if no one is home. Go ahead and get rid of the emails that are no longer in service, but don’t delete the ones that appear to be hibernating.
It’s much cheaper to re-engage a customer than to target a new customer. Re-engagement email campaigns can win back 14% to 29% of your email list.
A re-engagement email newsletter campaign is the final chapter of our discussion of various types of email newsletters you can employ for your brand’s marketing efforts. We’ve previously discussed a monthly branding/lifestyle newsletter, and a drip campaign to hone into the customers most invested in your brand and reward them. Our final email newsletter format is the re-engagement campaign.
Although some brands may send out just one re-engagement campaign, we recommend three, much like a drip campaign. Now let’s get into the specifics of what makes a re-engagement campaign well, engaging!!
- Subject Line
- New offer – discount or coupon
- New service
- Survey
- CTA buttons
The subject line is what your customer sees in the initial email while their finger is hovering over the delete button. This is a critical junction to define what you want more than a nap or ice cream at this moment. Go ahead, get emotional. Common re-engagement subject lines can be:
- We Miss You!
- Did we do something wrong?
- How was your vacation?
- Remember when….
- Haven’t seen you in a while…
Get creative and think about what would make you stop in your tracks and open an email newsletter, and off we go to some additional sweet lures.
Sometimes, all it takes is a little show of support, like a discount or coupon for a limited time (remember, this is just for your sleepy email customers – you are already taking care of your active customers – right?)
Maybe, distance has changed how they feel about the brand or their past buying experiences – ask them in a simple survey. Here’s a great idea, ask them to complete a simple survey upon completion, you send them a coupon to shop!!! Survey questions should help you determine what you are missing in your newsletters, i.e., is it content? Delivery times?
Providing additional resources for past customers is also another way to re-engage. They’ve bought your product and the love affair is over? Hardly. How about writing easy articles on the upkeep of their product, upgrades to the product, additions, and accessories for their product? Keep them using that product and keep them coming back for more information, add-ons, and accessories.
And finally, offer them a CTA button (call-to-action) that can say “Keep me on the list” or “Unsubscribe.”
It happens to the best of email newsletters. But planning on a little housekeeping every so often will keep your email list active and your marketing efforts cost effective.
