We all know that it’s easier to get additional sales from your existing customers than start from scratch with a new lead, so win-back campaigns should be a key piece of your marketing strategy.
What is a win-back campaign?
A win-back campaign is a strategy designed to get your customers excited about your company again.
This is easily most often done through email marketing, though it’s worth noting direct mail works, as does simply picking up the phone. For our purposes we’re going to focus on using emails to encourage get customers reengaged.
Option #1: Reselling
In a resale campaign, you want to identify customers who have purchased from you in the past, but are now radio silent. Your campaign should remind them of how awesome it is to work with you (or use your products) and tempt them to purchase again.
Option #2: Reengagement
While I’ve had people sit on my email list for years before they become clients, most of the time interest wanes after a year or so. Perhaps they learned what they needed from you, or just have a new hobby. Interests change, and that’s okay, but if you have people that haven’t opened any of your emails from the last six months, you may need to let them go.
Yes, it’s better to have a small list that actively opens, and clicks on your emails, rather than a big list with a low open rate.
In this case, you’d use a win-back campaign as an effort to spark new interest in your content and get them reengaged.
If you are selling products, your resale and reengagement campaigns may be combined:
If your sales don’t happen through ecommerce, your reengagement campaigns may be more about giving a user options to find the best content for them.
Personally, I give my email subscribers an option to choose what type of content they’d like to see, and cut out anything they don’t want:
While Nordstrom provides the option to change the frequency:
What kind of results can you expect?
Return Path studied the win-back campaigns of 33 companies to learn how effective they were. Here’s what they found out:
- 45% of recipients who received the win-back campaigns read subsequent emails from the retailers
- 57 days was the average length of time between when recipients received a win-back email and when they read a subsequent email from the retailer
- Emails that simply tried to get inactive customers to opt in to receive emails again had a low 1.8% read rate; however, for win-back emails with the phrases “miss you” or “come back” in the subject line, the read rate jumped to 13%.
Harvard Business Review covered the results of win back campaigns for a telecom company, who saw ROI as high as 793%!
What happens if you don’t win your customers back?
Win-back campaigns can bring tremendous results, but we know that not everyone will bite. If that’s the case, you might try making a last ditch effort to save the relationship, and then cut the user free.
Excited to get started winning your customer back, but not sure where to start? Give us a shout!