The marketer’s job has become harder than ever to keep customers engaged. Here’s some tips for your re-engagement email campaigns so you can overcome this challenge.

 
Brands have accelerated their digital transformation so that it’s now vital you have some kind of digital presence, meaning that online shopping and digital inboxes are far more crowded than they have ever been with marketing emails reportedly up by 21% between December 2020 and March 2021.
 
This digital first space that brands now operate within makes it even more difficult for brands to stand out when your competitors are simply a click away.
 
And for the customer this has given them a wider choice, but this increased choice only fuels their potential adulterous desires.
 
With customers claiming they would not care if 74% of brands disappeared from their lives, how can you keep your customers engaged and spending their hard earned cash with your brand – and not be one of the 74% of brands easily dismissed by customers.
 

Understanding the value of an engaged database

 
We all know that’s its more expensive to acquire a new customer than retain one, but its not just simply around the cost per conversion.
 
Keeping customers engaged with your brand is vital to develop loyalty – and loyal customers are much more valuable to the long-term success of your brand than fickle quick win customers who find you, then forget you.
 
Customers can show signs of disengagement in two ways.

1. Simply not interacting with your communications, whether that be not opening an email, or not clicking on a social ad.
2. No longer purchasing with you anymore. Both are equally important to monitor and react to.

Identifying the weak spots in the health of your database

 
Many brands react to disengagement through frequency by using a common traffic light system to identify who within their database is green and highly interacting with their communications, therefore can warrant a higher frequency of messages than those in Red segments who need light touches.
 
Getting the combination wrong can lead to the fatal result of unsubscribes. And once lost a customer very rarely re-engages with your brand again.
 
Brands that take this a step further are those that use AI and machine learning to identify those customers who are predicted to unsubscribe. Those savvy marketers know this is an extremely important segment of customers to try to re-engage correctly to avoid losing them forever.
 
But it’s not all about interactions. A customer can show signs of becoming disengaged with your brand by not re-purchasing.
 
Most brands overcome this challenge by setting an arbitrary time period for re-engagement. This could be a few weeks or a few months depending on your products and services.
 
At that point, communications can be triggered to draw those customers back in to encourage a repurchase with your brand.
 
However, those brands that are leading with digital innovation are those who again turn to AI and machine learning to predict those customers who are most likely to lapse.
 
By identifying those customers, you can trigger relevant communications to them before they have become fully disengaged with your brand and avoiding the likelihood of them switching over to a competitor.

Treat each customer uniquely

 
All the ways you can react to disengagement rely on the foundation of data. Having up-to-date access to your customers behaviours and engagements will provide you with the insights to decide at what moment is right to try and re-engage for each customer.
 
But gaining the benefits from these insights relies on the core element of automation. Brands must automate these campaigns and processes to get the most effective outcome.
 
This is because each customer behaviours differently. They open emails at different times of day, are inspired by different creatives and messaging, and purchases different items at different points. You can’t assume they are all the same.
 
By using your customer data to its full potential, you can optimise and automate the timings of when messages are sent so that it is personalised to each individual customer at the most optimal moment before they become unengaged with your brand.
 
Someone who engages with your brand frequently should be re-engaged quickly if a pattern in their behaviour shifts, against someone who is seen to occasionally interact with you.
 
Same goes for purchasing, if a customer regularly purchases with you, then suddenly stops, its vital you identify them based on their regular purchasing patterns and not an overall time period.

Use customer behaviour data to personalise your re-engagement emails and increase the chance of conversion

 
Secondly, using past transactional and current behavioural data, the content within the message can be automatically populated to showcase the right message that will have a greater impact on re-engaging your customer.
 
For example, showing customers a product they have recently purchased to tempt them back to your website, or perhaps something complimentary to a previous purchase, or maybe even something you know they may have browsed in the last couple of weeks.
 
All these different data points can help you dynamically change the content within your re-engagement email campaign so that it becomes relevant to each individual.
 
The greater the level of personalisation you can add into your re-engagement campaigns, whether that be the most optimal moment, or most relevant message, all will have significant impact in improving the success of bringing that customer back to re-engaging with your brand and coming a longer term valuable customer.

Now That’s What I Call Marketing Automation

 
Re-engagement email campaigns feature as Track 2 in our latest guide; Now That’s What I Call Marketing Automation which showcases some of the best uses of marketing automation which includes these other campaigns…
⭕ Welcome journey campaigns
⭕ Contextually driven personalisation
⭕ Customer driven personalisation
⭕ Back in stock emails
⭕ Replenishment emails
 
Download your copy now, be inspired and get to the top of the chart through marketing automation!

 

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