Email marketing news

Winning back former email marketing respondents

As a business grows it is always a good idea to compete to win back your former customers. Email marketing can prove effective as a tool to reintegrate consumers. This will be much easier, less time consuming and less expensive than having to find new customers – use past consumer knowledge to work this in your favour.

Here are 5 top tips to lure back your existing customers using effective email marketing strategies:

Understand the customer you are trying to win back

Revise the consumer, previous email marketing habits and have a firm grasp of their behaviour and see the pattern of purchasing before they stopped buying altogether. If you file all your customer purchases in a CRM system it may be a good idea to investigate when they last ordered anything then you can segment your lists according to the time that lapsed since their last purchase. You could start by assigning groups so it may be; those who have not purchased within the last year? Those who have purchased one item? Those who have not purchased in the last 12 plus months?

Let’s get personal

Work everything to your advantage take pride in knowing they did once respond to your email marketing campaign. Explain to them that you have missed them and would like to gain back a valuable customer – similarly this can be reflected by the subject line you send. An example could be ‘[First name], we would love you to come back’ or ‘Where have you been [First name]’ .You need to use something personal to encourage them to open the email.

Encourage with a truly unique offer

Through segmentation you should have a unique offer set to win back your customers. Offering nice discounts on great complementary products with regards to items they have already purchased may just be the push they need. Helping them to remember the experience they have had with your organisation/company will hopefully entice them to interact with you through email marketing again.

Be interested in their opinion

It is important that you don’t forget about your customer’s feelings and opinions. You could include a link on your email marketing that takes them to an online survey where they can relay their comments, opinions and whether they are satisfied with your company’s services. This is a tool which will generate feedback that will help you in the long term. It may be that you find that a product your customer was in fact looking for in the past may be something which you consider to bring into your market.

Be frank

Sometimes it's best just to find out whether or not it's time to cut the line. Unresponsive subscribers who remain lifeless despite multiple highly targeted win-back campaigns might not be worth the time, effort, and money to resuscitate. A simple, last-ditch email could say something like, "We noticed we haven't heard from you in a long time. We don't like spam either, so let us know if you'd like to keep receiving our emails. " Then give them the option to stay subscribed (in which case, you might want to throw in an offer to thank them for that simple action), or to unsubscribe.

Businesses can get so focused on getting "new " customers that they forget about keeping the good ones around and getting them to be more active. So start those win-back email campaigns now; you may be surprised at what a little reminder can do.