A Guide to Re Engagement Emails

One of the most difficult email marketing challenges for companies is reengaging subscribers who have become inactive. Inactive subscribers are not only not seeing your sales content, they can also impact your bounce rate, causing deliverability issues across your campaigns.

Re engagement email sequences can help revitalize interest from inactive customers and get your company back on their radar. This article will explain how to win back inactive customers through re engagement emails and will provide you with some examples to help you get started. 

What Is a Re Engagement Email?

Re engagement emails are created to re-generate interest from subscribers who have stopped opening your emails. These emails should be designed to stand out to get an inactive subscriber’s attention. Re engagement email campaigns can effectively boost email engagement rates if they have dropped or provide a reminder to past customers that will bring their attention back to your company. This helps your company meet sales and revenue goals while maintaining brand awareness. 

What Is a Re Engagement Email Campaign?

To implement a re-engagement email series, you must understand what it is. A re-engagement email is a series of emails delivered to your list’s least-active subscribers. In contrast to standard email marketing mailings, the recipient’s decrease in recent participation. “re-engagement email” refers to how it encourages the recipient to reconnect with your business.

A re-engagement email campaign is simply a tactic that marketers use to get in touch with leads who formerly showed interest in and engaged with their business but have since stopped being active. Re-engaging subscribers aims to ignite that spark and generate more interest. It’s time to un-ghost your subscribers.

2 Main Types Of Re-Engagement Campaigns

One of the most critical steps in the success of email marketing customer engagement is re-engagement campaigns, which are a vital component of mailing list management. Businesses can benefit from actively working their email subscriber lists to keep and generate interest. Here are the two main types of re-engagement email campaigns. 

Win Back Emails

A win back email is sent to those who haven’t opened your emails for a while now, so you’re unsure whether they’re interested in your business and offers. It’s kind of the OG re-engagement tactic that allows you to identify your inactive subscribers and either revive them or remove them from your email list.

The Most Common Type Of Win-Back Email Series 

• A Friendly Reminder Email 
• We Miss You Email
• Active Incentive Email
• Last Chance Email
• Good-Bye Email

Reactivation Emails

This group of re-engagement emails has one primary objective: to persuade mailing list subscribers to take the necessary steps to advance them along the sales funnel. These nudge subscribers to interact more with the website to decide whether to buy.

The Most Common Type Of Reactivation Emails 

• Abandoned Cart Emails
• “Latest Offers” Email
• The Recommendation Email
• Feedback Email
• Survey Email

The Importance Of Re-Engagement Campaigns

No one likes to see their effort and hard work in creating email campaigns being ignored. But it’s kind of the nature of the beast; inevitably, there will be subscribers that won’t open your emails. 

Customer turnover is a fact of life in marketing, and acquiring new clients can be 4-6 times more expensive than keeping existing ones. This is why trying to warm up “cold” leads is worthwhile and should be a regular practice.

How to Win Back Inactive Customers with Emails

There are many great ways you can use emails to win back inactive customers. Top strategies for winning back customers through reengagement emails are:

• Give them a choice: This can be a powerful technique. At times, the best thing you can do is provide a choice to your email subscribers. Emails that provide a choice of whether they want to unsubscribe or stay subscribed can make customers think and be reminded on their own why they subscribed to receive emails in the first place. Since inactive subscribers can harm deliverability rates, giving readers an easy way to unsubscribe can help with your email campaign metrics as well.
• Offer additional value: Businesses evolve over time and aim to add new value to their products or services. When you add new value, it is a golden opportunity to re-engage past customers and email subscribers whose interest may have faded over time. It drives higher open rates and click through rates as well.
• Provide a reminder of why they signed up: This can be an effective engagement technique that outlines the value your emails offer. When subscribers are reminded of the value provided, it is likely to spark their interest in the goals they once had or the positive experiences they had reading your emails.
• Optimize email send times: The best time to send an email changes as your subscribers routine changes. Optimizing send time will allow you to get to the top of the subscribers inbox when they are ready to engage with emails. AudiencePoint leverages 2nd party data to help you know the perfect time to send an email to your list of subscribers. We can even help you segment your list by optimized send time. 
• Give discounts or offer something for free: This is one of the most used customer re engagement strategies for a reason because it is effective. Offering monetary value through a discount or something for free will stop most people in their tracks and make them want to click on the email to know more. 

Re Engagement Email Examples

If you’re creating your first re engagement email campaign, it can be helpful to see some examples of emails you can send. You can use the following examples as templates, so you know a basic structure to follow when writing your own. 

Example #1 (Providing a discount)

Subject Line: $20 Off On Your Next Purchase

Body: It’s been 6 months since your last purchase, and we’ve missed you. Here’s a gift from us. Take $20 off the next time you shop at our store. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Example #2 (Reminder of why they signed up)

Subject Line: Hey! Are you still here?

Body: It’s been 6 months since you last clicked an email from us. We understand you may be busy and that life may have gotten in the way, but we wanted to provide a brief reminder of why you signed up for emails in the first place. Our emails provide you with: 

• Access to daily educational resources
• Invitations and reminders about upcoming events 
• Notifications about our latest blog posts
• Other occasional news

If you no longer want to get these emails from us, you can unsubscribe now. 

When Should You Send Re Engagement Emails?

Usually, the optimal time frame to send a re engagement email is when someone hasn’t engaged with an email in six months to a year, although this time frame can vary depending on your company’s industry and sales cycles. When someone has gone that amount of time without interacting they have likely disengaged, and it can be helpful to provide them with a little reminder that gets their attention back. 

AudiencePoint’s email marketing insight software can help with this. Our software, ListFit can help you analyze your list of subscribers and compare their activity to our second-party data pool to determine which of your subscribers are truly inactive and which of your subscribers are still engaging with email marketing. You can then create a re engagement campaign that is tailored toward regaining their interest.

Re Engagement Campaign Best Practices

When you send re engagement emails, there are some common best practices you can follow to get better results. Common best practices are:

• Follow up: You should follow up if someone doesn’t open or respond to your first email. Most people receive many emails in a day, so your email could get buried in someone’s inbox. Following up provides an opportunity to get someone’s attention if they didn’t see your first email. However, don’t follow up too much, or it comes off as spammy. 
• Make it easy to opt out: If a subscriber has been inactive for a while, there is a chance they are no longer interested in receiving your emails. You should make it easy for them to unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your emails. This benefits your company and subscriber, so you both know where you stand. 
• Put extra effort into subject lines: When creating re-engagement emails, it’s crucial to make your email subject lines stand out. People who are used to ignoring your emails will more easily scroll past them or delete them. The best way to make subject lines stand out is to break your usual flow or formatting or clearly feature the value you are offering.  
• Reinforce your value: Outline the value your emails offer and provide valuble offers in your call to action. This will help remind subscribers why your emails are important and can sway them to start actively engaging again. 
• Segment your email list: You should not send a re-engagement email to your entire email list. You can utilize your email marketing software to segment your audience into appropriate lists for re-engagement emails.
• Check your sender reputation: Make sure your emails are being accepted by receiving servers and not being bounced or sent to spam regularly.

If you follow these email engagement best practices, you will be on your way toward creating effective re engagement emails. 

Conclusion

A re engagement email campaign can help regain interest from inactive email subscribers. These emails should be a win-win that provides value to the company and the email subscriber. When creating a re engagement campaign, remember to make your emails stand out, reinforce your value, and provide additional value whenever possible. This will lead to high rates of success in your campaign. 

Contact AudiencePoint to learn more today!