After convincing your prospects and people interested in increasing with your brand to join your mailing list, the biggest turndown is to see them unsubscribe. Every year your mailing list will decay by an average of 22.5 %. Unsubscription happens over a period of time, with this engagement, ultimately leading to the subscriber finding your messages completely irrelevant. But, due to the amount of investment made for building and curating email lists, businesses strive to minimize the outgoing subscribers using a special email series called Winback emails.
Converting even a minuscule percentage of these disengaged subscribers can be a victory for your organization as repeat business is always more preferable than new business. Email developers and marketers, read this article to get tips for designing and drafting Winback emails.
What Are Winback Emails
Winback emails are a series of targeted messages sent to dormant contacts using personalization data. They are both educational and promotional in nature. The dormant subscribers are either educated about the utility of your products/services, and a strong sense of motivation to continue using your products is given in the form of discounts and other offers. Winback emails are aimed at lowering your cost of acquisition for new customers as reactivation is strategically more beneficial. You already have the personalization data as well as a log of their online activity on your website. Usually, these emails are time elapsed, and they are based on the average lifetime value as well as inactivity period.
Reasons Behind Unsubscribing
Some of the few reasons behind unsubscribing is receiving too many emails, changes in the customer demographics, and joining the email list for the welcome benefits. Depending on your interactions, you can grade the quality of your leads and see where they fit in your sales funnel. Remember, many people purposefully become inactive to access the benefits of Winback emails. As discussed earlier, the period of inactivity also plays a crucial role in shaping the win-back email series. In many cases, spam filters also cause unsubscription.
Let us see how to craft and design the winback emails:
Drop A Reminder
In your first message, you should drop a reminder about why they have subscribed to your mailing list in the first place. Talk about the benefits of continuing to engage with your emails and avoid being persuasive at this stage. Personalize these messages based on their recent activities and the customer demographics data available to you. Recognition and appreciation should be on your priority list while crafting the reminders. Here’s an example from Unroll (dot) me sending a simple reminder email:
The email template design should be similar to your website, and it should have a strong CTA button.
Run Promotional Emails
Naturally, the next step is to run promotional emails. You can start by offering little incentives and vamp up the benefits with time. Giving away free deliveries and bundled freebies is a smart way of offering discounts as they are cascading mechanisms. Remember, we talked about people purposefully staying inactive to receive the winback emails? Cascading discounts are a great tactic to fight back such deliberate benefit seeking. In your promotional emails, you can provide discount coupons as well as known and ke stable benefits like expedited shipping or next day delivery. Promotional messages should also follow personalization and segmentation best practices. Below an example from Outdoor Voices displays how you can use a cascading discount to ensure your purchase from your customers:
Ask For Your Subscriber’ Opinions
In ‘How to win friends and influence people’, Dale Carnegie has emphasized the importance of hearing. He states that good listeners are automatically termed as people good at conversations, and this applies equally to email marketing. You should proactively ask for the opinions of your engaged subscribers regarding the issues they are facing. For instance, if they are not comfortable with the mailing frequency, you can offer them to adjust it themselves. Running surveys will help you gather vital information regarding your disengaged subscribers, and they are more likely to respond to such messages as they can’t speak their heart out. You can use various innovative elements in your final message that instill human emotions of parting.
Final Win-Back Email: Engage Or Stop Damage
It may sound odd, but you should stop after a certain point. Disengaged subscribers hurt your deliverability metrics and lower your visibility to even your engaged subscribers. If you feel that your dormant contacts are not going to purchase from you or engage with your messages, you can run an exit survey and help them unsubscribe. This will keep your mailing list hygienic and stop the damage caused by them. This also lowers your spam rate.
Summing Up
In this article, I have primarily focused on two things: staying in line with the purpose of sending win-back emails and striving for relevance. Your messages should be relevant for your subscribers, and they should in turn be relevant for your business. The purpose of sending win-back females is to ensure that none of your potential customers turn dormant due to shortcomings in your email marketing strategy. Also, you should refrain from including contacts that are going to damage your sender reputation. I hope that you find the blog insightful for crafting and designing your winback emails.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the result driven email marketing agency that specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
