Revive the Dormant Leads with Win Back Emails

Dormant customers should always have a place in your email marketing strategy as well as your sales strategy. Client acquisition is a long, tedious, and expensive process. Converting new leads requires a lot more effort as compared to keeping old customers happy. Customer retention has a huge impact on your bottom line, and it is a fact that the revenue generated from existing clients always forms a bigger share of total earnings. While it is virtually impossible to retain 100% of your clients, you can always try to win back your old, dormant customers, and today, we are going to discuss how you can use win-back emails. To learn about the win-back email series, read this article, and see how you can follow the below-mentioned strategies.

What Is Meant By A Win Back Email

A win-back email is a personalized message to your inactive clients sent to re-engage them with your online store. The email template copy and call-to-action (CTA) buttons are optimized to suit your inactive customer’s interest. Usually, brands go for a series of win-back emails as a separate email marketing campaign that is focused on making the dormant customers take action. This could be re-subscribing to their services or ordering their products again based on the business model. Emails are a perfect fit for such efforts since they are relatively inexpensive and provide companies with a more suitable avenue along with dedicated space with more freedom to pack various content types.

Why You Should Consider Win-Back Email Campaigns

A 5% increase in the customer retention rate can improve profits by 25% to 95% while it is 70% cheaper to retain a customer than acquiring a new one. Marketing Land finds that win-back emails have an open rate of 12%. Most of the data needed for sending win-back emails are easily available from your CRM. Thus, using the data from your CRM is worth the time and effort. Here, we are listing down a step-by-step guide for running a win-back email series:

Remind Your Customers About Yourself

A lot of times, people stop using an app or service simply because they were not onboarded properly. You can remind your customers about your product/services as the first resort to winning them back. Dropping a simple reminder and offering support for re-engaging is a good way of letting them feel being cared for. Here’s an example of sending an informative win-back email coming from Dropbox. It offers actionable insights along with the intuitive CTAs: (Image Source) Here’s another emailer from Grammarly: (Image Source)

Give Them An Incentive For Re-Engaging

Giving out personalized discounts or freebies is a time-tested method of letting your customers know that you care for them. Gift cards and gift vouchers with personalized notes work like a charm. It is smart to offer an incentive since your dormant customers will find it a win-win situation.

Use Discount Ladders

Discount ladders in email marketing use the systematic increase in the discounts as you send more messages. Offering discounts with a gradual increase allows you to increase the likelihood of them re-engaging as it is always difficult to convert a dormant lead that is cold for a long time. In many cases, brands set a purchase amount as a prerequisite to avail of the discount offer. This helps them save on customers that go inactive only for availing the win back discounts. Here’s an example from Outdoor Vibes that uses this tactic: (Image Source)

Ask For Customer Feedback

Often, it is advisable to ask for customer feedback instead of going ahead with discounts. Getting feedback allows you to understand why the customers left your product/services in the first place and give you a hint about what you can do to win them back. Even if the customer decides not to opt-in for receiving further pieces of communication, they will give you important data regarding the quality of your products. This creates a customer-friendly and honest brand image. In this example from Seeso, they have used a very engaging cover image with a supportive copy with two subtle CTAs: (Image Source)

Unsubscription Emails

Despite your best efforts, some customers will unsubscribe after deciding that they never want to interact with you. In such cases, it is advisable to make it easy for them to opt-out of your mailing list as it allows you to focus on more likely to convert customers. This also frees up your resources, but you can always make one last try before calling it a day. This email for confirming unsubscription from Beta List is one of our favorites as it appeals on a very personal note thanks to the Toy Story cover image. The copy allows the user to instantly relate with the brand as an intimate friend as it enables lowering mailing frequency while also doubling as a feedback email: (Image Source)

Summing Up

Customer retention and reactivation depend on the data collected by you during the engagement period. Email developers make extensive use of personalization and segmentation for setting up such automation workflows. Instead of making the message about your product, focus on how you can improve for mutual benefit, and also try to use urgency in your copy. We hope that you find this article on reviving dormant leads with win-back emails insightful.

Author Bio

Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, which specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email Conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.