How You Can Re-engage Customers with Email Newsletters
Not every single customer, or potential customer, will open every email newsletter that you send them. It might be a bad time for them, but the reality is, more often than not, it’s down to the clarity and engagement of your subject line, body text snippet, and other factors. But, if a customer that used to open the majority of your email newsletters has stopped – there might be a more complex reason why that’s happened. It’s time to get creative to reactivate the interest you once had from that person.
So, how can you do that?
1. Automation
2. Contact list
3. Content
1. Automation
First things first. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to automate your email newsletters. Automation is essential for saving time, but it’s also about tracking and understanding your contact’s actions, and creating content based on their actions. Here’s an example:
You send an email newsletter out to all of your contacts. 40% of your contacts opened your email newsletter, but the majority didn’t. You now have two different types of contacts – engaged contacts and non-engaged contacts. But to best test this, you send three more newsletters to the same contacts. The opened and unopened rates of your newsletters are different to your first email newsletter results with only 32% of your contacts that opened your last email. To remedy the process, you can set up conditions and actions in your automation process to group inactive contacts. This could be after eight emails, if a contact hasn’t opened one email, they are removed from your contact list. By doing this, this will improve your results for your email newsletter campaigns.
That’s just one example, there’s tons of benefits of using automation for your business. If you want to winback a group of contacts that are no longer opening your email newsletter before removing them from your contact list, you can setup an automation sequence that is tailored for those contacts and create a special offer, request feedback, or something else to re-engagement them. If you’re segmenting your contacts (we’ll speak about this next), you’ll be able to personalise your emails, and create more powerful automations.
2. Contact list
You probably have a ‘master’ contact list where you send all your email newsletters to, but do you have multiple contact lists? When you segment your audience, you can build campaigns specifically for that type of audience. This is especially true if you have different types of customer avatars. But it’s not just the segmenting your contacts into groups, you should consider defining your ‘master’ contact list with personal traits about that contact. You might have their email address, but do you have their phone number? This could also open the doors for different marketing activities in the future, such as SMS campaigns. You might decide on incorporating a birthday deal for customers, why you would need that data to leverage that deal… you don’t want to be guessing when someone’s birthday is, that’s never a good idea anyway!
If you’re stuck on ideas on how to get the missing details of your contacts you already have, you can implement a feedback form or competition that includes the missing data you need from your contacts. Just be careful doing this. If you’re missing a lot of information about your contacts, you don’t want to include too much personal information. Instead, creating a strategy to get that information over a period of time. Think smart, not fast.
3. Content
Truth be told, it might be that you’re sending out too many emails that have no value or are too similar in format, images, copy, or all three. Let’s put it like this, if your contacts receive three emails from you and the majority of the content is the same… would you remortgage your home to place a bet that your contacts would open the fourth email? You wouldn’t, because there’s a high chance they wouldn’t open the email from you again, as they already know what you’re offering them.
Take a different approach with your content. If you’ve been sending the same old email newsletter for months, it might be time for a change. Try adding new topics, or switch up the style of your writing. You can improve the content for your email newsletters to make sure that you are always providing valuable and interesting information to your contacts. This could include anything from the latest news and trends in your industry, to helpful tips and advice, to interesting facts and insights. Remember, if you’re making a change to your email newsletters, whether that’s changing the images or information you use, test and measure your results so you can continue to improve your campaigns.
Lastly
Think about the value you offer your customers and potential customers in your contact list. What can your contacts gain from reading your email newsletter? Which contacts in your list are loyal, active or inactive? Think about your contacts as individuals, so you can create more defined groups and proactive campaigns that’s tailored to them – not everyone! If your contacts are no longer opening your emails, it’s time to rethink your approach to email newsletters sooner rather than later.
As always, if you have any questions, or if I can be of help in any way, drop me an email on eve@fantheflames.co.uk or if you’d like to talk more about how I can help your business grow, feel free to book in a quick virtual coffee with me HERE.
