Connecting With Your Customer: List Re-engagement

Your email list is a bit like your house plants. Really, you ask? Well, the analogy isn’t as far off as you may think. Like house plants, your email list is pretty easy to keep up when you first get it. However, things get more challenging the longer you have it. 

With plants, you have to make sure you water and feed them and give them the proper amount of light. You get busy with the holiday or with a project and the next thing you know those house plants have seen better days. To save them from an unfortunate demise, you’ll want to give them some good plant food, water them and make sure they have to right temperature and humidity to flourish. 

You’ll want to do something similar with your email list if it’s gotten brown and wilted. It’s called list re-engagement, and it’s the next topic in our series on connecting with your customer.  

Before you do any type of re-engagement, you’ll need to find out why these customers disengaged with you in the first place. There are many reasons why this happens. Perhaps you were overenthusiastic and emailed them to death. Maybe your content wasn’t as relevant to them as you imagined. It could be that your emails weren’t as well optimized for mobile devices as they should have been. Whatever the reason, before you can work to bring them back in the fold, you need to know why they left. Otherwise you’ve set yourself in a doomed cycle of rinse and repeat.

In order to win these customers back, the first things you’ll want to do is segment them. You’ll want to separate the truly disengaged from those who may have missed an email or two. 

Define what disengaged means to you. Is it six to nine months or over a year? Anything much less than that and you’ll seem clingy. The reason for separating these customers out is that they’ll require special treatment. Keeping in mind why they left in the first place, reel them back in with a catchy subject line and maybe a tantalizing offer. Remind them of the value you offer and what you can do for them. Try to personalize it as much as you can. Everyone likes a little extra attention.

From there it’s time to wait. Select a number of days (usually a week or so) and then send a follow up email. These types of emails are sometimes called ‘we miss you’ emails. If you don’t have a response to the follow up email in another week, you can send a final notice. 

You’ll also need to set expectations for this type of re-engagement campaign. Before you begin, decide what you’re trying to accomplish and what success will look like. It might not immediately translate into increased sales. The idea here is to win back customers, and before you hit them with a hard sell you’ve got to regain their confidence. 

Keep these list re-engagement points in mind, and you’ll have everything you need to show off your green thumb when it comes to winning back customers.