How to Create a Game-Changing Re-engagement Email Campaign and Win-Back Your Lost (Almost) Subscribers

As an email marketer, one of your core jobs is to grow subscriber lists.

As people come to an email list from the best of your efforts, they often unsubscribe. Whether it is a normal thing or not, it is alarming.

So, before a bunch of leads are unsubscribed from your lists, what should be the best way to keep them?

Re-engagement email campaign would be the most feasible idea.

It will help inactive subscribers to rediscover your services. As well as, people who didn’t seem to impress much with your newsletter may have found new motivations to stay.

In this blog, we will be showing you almost everything about re-engagement email campaigns, how to create one, best practices, and some of the best re-engagement email examples.

Let’s dive into it.

What is a Re-engagement Email Campaign

A re-engagement email campaign is a type of email campaign where you send specially crafted emails to the most inactive subscribers in your email lists.

That means re-engagement emails are destined for the less engaged segment of your subscribers to reignite their interest in your products and newsletters.

Well, you can name this type of email campaign in multiple ways-

• Reactivation Email Campaign
• Boosting Email Engagement
• Win-back Email Campaign
• Improving Subscriber Retention

In a nutshell, an email campaign that is aimed at bringing back your inactive users in a successful way is called a re-engagement email campaign. 

Now the question is when you should go for this type of email marketing.

Well, according to industry best practices, a healthy waiting period to find out your inactive users is 30-50 days.

After this time, you should knock them and arrange a survey on their current opinions about your product. 

Not only does it help to get the users back but also understands the consumer desire for your service. In the future, this data will assist you to make good changes. 

Why Should You Go for a Re-engagement Email Campaign

Email marketing lists degraded by about 22% a year.

Marketing Sherpa

Inactive email subscribers are a common issue in every industry. Though, it wouldn’t always be your fault to have such an issue. What you need is to work on it and find a solution.

Take a look at this report on industry-wise unsubscribe rates –

The threatening fact about inactive subscribers is, that they can ruin the sender’s reputation and email deliverability.

The worse is, that you can be listed in their spam box. And who knows better about Spam folders than email marketers? 

The simplest way to get rid of this problem is to remove the list of inactive subscribers. But with this easy step, you can lose a large number of users who were active once upon a time.

This is where comes a re-engagement email campaign. With this, you can easily keep your email list active without increasing the unsubscribe rate.

How to Create a Re-engagement Email Campaign and Best Practices

At weMail, we often send re-engagement email campaigns. Also, we have conducted thorough research to find out the best techniques practiced by industry experts to win-back their inactive subscribers.

As a result, you will find the below steps and best practices realistic. In this section, we will share with you how we have planned those re-engagement campaigns from scratch, and created one –

1. Sort Down Your Inactive Subscribers

Before starting the campaign the foremost important job you should do is segment the inactive subscribers. Now, it will be easier to send them the most relevant content about your service or product. 

How to sort down inactive subscribers?

You can find inactive users by checking recent activities. Like – the last time they have opened an email or clicked a link, add a product to the cart, make a purchase or simply read or put a comment in one of your blog posts.

The most efficacious is knowing their past or a recent purchase. You may send an email offering a discount on that particular type of product. 

Collect their generic data. For example- 

• Gender
• Location
• Age
• Most purchased items from you
• Online behavior

2. Eye Catchy Re-engagement Email Subject Lines

A proper re-engagement email subject line can rise your inactive subscribers. And for that, remove your regular subject lines.

This is your last chance to make this relationship fruitful. A/B testing can help you to understand the most optimistic subject line for them. Also, you can consider intensive personalization like calling their names and pitching through a more casual tone.

Some Effective Email Subject Lines for Inactive Subscribers- 

• $XX Discount on Your Next Purchase
• Hey Aris! Are You There?
• Why Don’t We Make Up Again?
• Don’t Breakup With Us!
• We Are Missing You So Bad!
• Please Come Back!
• We Miss You, Aric!
• Is This Goodbye, Forever?
• Do You Still Want to Hear from Us?

3. Concentrate on Your Email Content Tone

In any generic email campaign, it’s recommended to sound conversational.

But when it comes to re-engagement emails, your voice and content approach should more friendly and profitable for the receiver.  

Try to stay as personable as possible. Moreover, if the content is providing empathy then you can hope your email subscriber won’t let you down.

Don’t forget to make it short, you shouldn’t make them bored. 

4. Re-engagement Email Template

Now you have the inactive subscribers list and the specific content for them. So, you can jump to make the template for this email campaign. 

Don’t just send your regular emails with some modifications. You must create a template according to your brand theme. 

One important thing you should put very carefully is the CTA buttons. Try to keep 2 CTAs.

One will land the email receiver on your product or home page.

The other one will approach his/ her to unsubscribe you. So you will get true feedback from that person.  

We will add some examples of re-engagement email templates for a better understanding. 

5. Offer Tempting Discounts 

67% of buyers desire personalized content from brands. Sadly, almost half of them get irritated when companies don’t offer specified content.

Adobe

This method will be effective if your subscribers have made a purchase before.

Giving them a pleasing discount (for example 40 or 50%) on their last or most purchased product would be nice. To customize a winning re-engagement email you can analyze on –

• Links they clicked
• Most visited product page
• Geographical location
• Emails they have opened

Maybe with a little more motivation, they would think about using your service.

It will be a wise decision to not lose them completely by giving a tempting discount leaning on your profit margins. Most eCommerce businesses use this discount strategy.

6. Ask for Specific Feedback

Feedbacks are crucial. And, normally you won’t be getting them so easily. But we are talking about your inactive subscribers. They are inactive, so there are some reasons behind their silence for sure.

Your game as an email marketer is to find out those reasons. Hence, what would be more helpful than a re-engagement email in such cases?

With your re-engagement email campaign, you can ask them for feedback directly like –

• What is bothering them about your service?
• Is there something that you could do to motivate them
• Do they have any suggestions for your service
• Do they need a new set of content types that would be more interesting for them?

Asking these questions always sparks some curiosity. So do they involve your subscribers in coming back with a reply in most cases?

7. Always Follow Up

Your first re-engagement email may go unnoticed as the subscribers get lots of emails every day. To be detected, send the email once again. 

A report on eCommerce buyers shows that the customer who gets multiple cart abandonment emails are more likely to buy that or a similar product rather than those who get one email. 

So, don’t get upset and send follow-up emails. 

8. Automate Your Re-engagement Emails 

As we mentioned earlier you should follow up on the re-engagement emails, there is an incredible way to do that. You can use the automation feature in your email marketing tool. 

Here, you can go for a response-based email. Like, if your subscribers interact with your email the email sending system will stop and notify you. 

After sending 3/5 emails if the receiver doesn’t reply or interact you can make a list of inactive users and remove them from your subscriber list. 

With the weMail advanced email automation feature, you can easily automate this re-engagement email sequence at ease.

9. Investigate Your Email Campaign Impacts

It’s necessary to analyze the result of your sent re-engagement email campaigns. 

There are 3 ways to calculate the engagement-

Open rate: Open rate = (# emails opened ÷ # delivered emails) x 100

Click-through rate: CTR – (total measured clicks ÷ delivered emails) x 100

Click-to-Open rate: CTOR = (# of unique clicks ÷ # of unique opens) x 100

After you’ve calculated the results of your campaign, segmenting the inactive subscribers would be easier. Thereafter, you may nurture them to make the user relationship stronger. 

Needful Read: Open Rate vs Click Rate – Which One You Should Track First

7 Best Re-engagement Email Marketing Examples

Well, now that you know some of the best ways to create your re-engagement email marketing campaign, here we’ve gathered some more help for you.

Check out these re-engagement email examples to understand how these email works and why should you get inspiration from them. Check them out one by one –

1. Reminding the Customer of a Great Offer to Come Back

Apple tv+ send this email from a desperate urge to increase the number of paid subscribers. One year of free subscription is a big deal, and indeed this helps the OTTP rating of the platform.

If you want to give a happy offer to increase the activities of your sleeping subscribers, the above re-engagement email would be a fitting example. It combines both offers and reminders at the same time.

2. Creating Urgency with Tempting Discount

Discounts are cliches. But they always win over other strategies. So what could be more tempting than offering an exciting discount?

Williams-Sonoma goes all way around with their re-engagement email campaign. It has FOMO effects with time limitations, a considerable discount, and even free shipping.

3. We Miss You Email Example

Well, out of any discounts or monetary offers, you have plenty of room for nurturing the leads. Let’s look at the elements they have implemented –

The headline copy under the banner shows that you care. And, the platform also said that personally, they are missing you.

Secondly, they told you exactly what you are missing right now. Duolingo is a popular platform for language learners. So, with the right questions, they evoke a swift interest in learning a new language.

Finally, a powerful CTA that really works.

4. Innovative and Super Engaging Email Template for Former Customer

Be innovative in your re-engagement email design, and sometimes, be vivid.

Images work most to improve the first expression. Whenever someone opens an email that asks him/her to re-engage must have a sense of beauty as well as the perfect content.

Urban outfitters went even closer because they have successfully added a copy that presents a fine conversation.

When designing your email campaign, putting on this kind of creativity may get an awesome outcome.

5. Offer on Occasion to Re-Engage Customers

Following different occasions, you can send emails to your subscribers and make them come to your website.

Like the above example from Pottery Barn Kids, you can design a discount promotion for a customer’s entire order, or run it for selected product orders too.

This will increase your seasonal sales besides accomplishing your goal of win-back those people who aren’t been that much involved with your service for a long time.

7. Discount on Viewed product

For example, one of your subscribers views a product and doesn’t make action. You can get him/her back by giving a discount on that product. This works most of the time. Also, it manifests a feeling of personalization.

8. Offer According to Customer Viewed History

Ali Express sends this email that is solely based on a customer’s browsing history.

In this particular case, the customer was browsing products that were under $10 and didn’t make a purchase.

So, the marketing team was trying to give a push in that certain area that has a higher chance of a possible conversion.

Closing Up

For email marketers, the game of winning back the churning subscribers is always challenging. And, re-engagement campaign is one of the most powerful strategies to accomplish your goal.

But we believe, you are now ready to have your shot to keep the subscription rate stable, and even higher. Here are some check-list for re-engagement email marketing campaigns before you go –

• Focus on Subject Lines
• Build Eye-catchy Email Templates
• Offer Big Fat Discounts
• Send Follow up Emails
• Investigate Email Campaign Impact
• Test and repeat

So that’s it. Let us know if you still have something to know or share a few more lines.