Winback emails transform customers from passive readers into active customers, and fostering customer engagement is at the heart of any email campaign.
Also known as reactivation campaigns, winback emails are a common feature in direct marketing, particularly catalog marketing.
However, the expensive nature of catalogs in the modern era means that sending communications through traditional mail isn’t as effective as it once was. Sending a customer a winback email is a more affordable and equally rewarding option.
With their high levels of engagement, email winback campaigns have the power to overcome the potent spam filters of Yahoo, Outlook, and Gmail, which activate when successive emails from a particular sender aren’t read and are regularly deleted instead.
One of the added benefits of winback campaigns is that they allow businesses to remove emails from their marketing lists. While removing addresses from a valuable email list might sound counterintuitive, doing so may help a business remain on the good side of major email providers.
Not only do winback emails help businesses re-engage customers, but they also help companies keep their email lists tidy.
Let’s explore everything you need to know about winback email campaigns to help you decide when and how to implement this valuable marketing tool.
What is a winback email?
A winback email is part of an automated program that sends emails to lapsed customers, subscribers, or contacts, encouraging those recipients to re-engage with the company.
This can include recipients who have made a purchase in the past or engaged in some way with your brand. The winback email acts as a gentle nudge to remind customers who lost interest in your brand about your products or services.
According to statistics on the matter, an impressive 45% of subscribers who get a winback message will also read subsequent emails (via Validity). A winback email is less expensive than attracting new customers, and it’s easier to sell to a lapsed customer than a new contact.
How to write a winback email campaign
A successful winback email campaign starts with a clear plan. Before you can craft messages that bring subscribers back, you need to know who to target, when to reach out, and how to keep their attention once they open your email.
The following steps outline how to build a winback campaign that re-engages inactive customers and encourages them to reconnect with your brand.
1. Identify inactive contacts
For the average business, there's no set number of days or months after which an email address and the customer who uses it are considered inactive. Labeling an email address active or inactive depends on how often the company expects customers to interact with their business.
For some businesses, inactivity may come as soon as a few weeks, but other companies may wait several months before engaging their customers with a winback email campaign. Business owners must examine their sales data and the interaction rate for their most loyal customers and add emails to their inactive list regularly.
2. Determine when to send emails
Email marketing best practices for winback campaigns suggest that emails should go out once every 3 months to email addresses that haven’t engaged with the company. As more time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult for a business to maintain a personal and trusting relationship with the customer.
Adding inactive customers to the automated message flow at three-month intervals should give the customer a gentle nudge at just the right time. It’s not too soon that the recipient might feel overwhelmed by the amount of communication, and it’s not too late that the customer might have trouble remembering why they signed up for emails in the first place.
3. Write compelling copy
Half the battle in communicating with customers is getting them to open an email. The other is ensuring you hold their attention and inspire some positive reaction when you write an email. Guidelines that may help you get the most out of your customer winback campaign include the following.
- Use action verbs instead of passive language
- Employ simple language over cleverness
- Don’t use a spammy subject line
- Make the communication short rather than verbose
- You don’t need to write like Shakespeare to communicate an effective message to your customers. Don’t try to fight against the impatience of the average email recipient. Write brief and relevant copy, and you’ll likely succeed.
4. Include a CTA
Don’t just tell your customers about your company. Inspire them with a simple and clear call to action (CTA). Your CTA is the point at which you use direct and straightforward language to inspire someone to do more than read an email. Consider the following.
- Employ strong declarative statements
- Consider emotional and enthusiastic words
- Make readers feel FOMO (fear of missing out)
- Give your customer a solid reason to click
Remember: Don’t try a hard sales pitch with your call to action. You’re not trying to sell them using the CTA. Instead, you’re trying to get them to take action. It's best to avoid pressuring the reader with heavy sales tactics, so let them know what they might miss if they don’t click now to learn more.
Segment your audience for better results
Not all inactive customers are the same, so your winback emails shouldn't treat them that way. Segmenting your audience lets you send the right message to the right person at the right time.
Group contacts by inactivity period. Someone who hasn't opened your emails in 60 days is in a different place than someone who's been gone for a year. Create separate groups based on how long it's been since they last engaged. Your 60-day inactive customers might just need a friendly reminder, while your 6-month inactive list might need a stronger incentive to come back.
Tailor messages to customer behavior. Look at what your customers did before they went quiet. Did they browse without buying? Did they make one purchase and disappear? Did they download a resource but never convert?
Use this information to craft a win-back campaign that speaks directly to where they left off. A customer who abandoned their cart needs a different series of win-back emails than someone who used to buy from you regularly but stopped.
Personalization strategies for winback emails
The more you can make your winback email feel like it was written specifically for the recipient, the better your chances of getting them back.
Start with the basics and use their first name in the subject line or greeting. Then take it further by mentioning what they bought before or what they showed interest in.
Something like "Hey {name}, we thought you'd love our new running shoes since you picked up those trail runners last spring" feels much more genuine than a blanket "Come back and shop with us." This approach even works for turning one-time buyers into repeat customers.
Reference previous interactions or preferences. Did they sign up for emails about a specific product category, attend a webinar, or download a guide? Bring up those touchpoints in your winback email campaign.
Show them you remember their preferences and that you've been paying attention. This kind of detail makes customers feel valued instead of like just another email address on a list.
Winback email examples
Consider the following winback campaign examples to encourage more customers to interact with your company. You can try anything, from a discount code to a customer survey, to inspire disengaged customers to do more than read and delete.
Feedback
So, how did we do? We know it’s been a few months, but we want to make sure you love your new cookware. Is there anything we can do to improve? What would you like to see with our future releases? Fill out this quick survey, and you’ll help us make great new cookware and even score a discount.
Last chance
This year, we’re introducing an amazing new line of swimwear, and now is your last chance to get the color and size you want from last year’s line with our excellent discounts. Help us celebrate the arrival of summer and our new suits with a look at our previous bestsellers. Don’t wait; the new line drops this month!
Reminder
Did you forget? It’s our anniversary sale this month, and we’re offering valued customers like you the chance to save on our best-selling health and beauty products. Don’t miss out on our anniversary discounts. Visit our website today and help us celebrate 25 amazing years.
Incentive
We haven’t seen you around in a while! We’d love for you to see what we’ve been working on, and we’re offering you 20% off any purchase when you come back. Use the code GET20NOW to receive your discount. Your code expires in 30 days, so don’t wait to check out our brand-new products.
FOMO
We hope you love the yoga mat you purchased from us last season, but did you know we’ve already sold more than 100,000 yoga mats from our newly released line? Good things don’t last forever, and there’s a chance we’ll sell out soon. We want to help you upgrade your yoga experience. Come back, explore our new equipment, and take your yoga to the next level.
Unsubscribe
We don’t want to bother you, but we noticed you haven't visited us in a while, so this is just a quick note to make sure you’re still interested in receiving our emails. We want to share all of the amazing things our company is doing to improve the lives of our customers, but only if you want to hear all the details. Please let us know whether you’d like to continue receiving our emails or whether it’s time for us to part ways with an unsubscribe.
Using automation to streamline winback emails
Manually tracking inactive customers and sending emails one by one isn't realistic for most businesses. Automation takes the heavy lifting out of your win-back email campaigns so you can re-engage inactive customers without constant monitoring.
Instead of sending the same win-back email to everyone, create a series of messages that gradually increase in urgency or incentive. Your first email might be a friendly check-in, the second could offer a small discount, and the third might be a last chance message.
Once you build those sequences, they run on their own and reach out to inactive contacts at exactly the right intervals without you having to lift a finger.
You can also trigger emails based on inactivity milestones. Set specific timeframes that automatically kick off your winback emails when existing customers hit them.
For example, you might trigger the first email at 60 days of inactivity, another at 90 days, and a final one at 120 days. This way, every customer gets personalized attention based on their behavior.
Best practices for winback emails
Customers don’t want to read a novel when they open your sales email. They want to get to the heart of the matter to decide whether to click, call, or stop by your business. With that in mind, consider these simple email marketing best practices to help you re-engage a lost customer.
- Emphasize value. Why should consumers choose to purchase from your company over all others? Make sure your customers know the value you offer them with every product or service they buy.
- Send at the right time. Don’t send a winback email to your entire customer list. Make sure you use the winback strategy solely with past customers who haven’t interacted with your company in at least 3 months.
- Personalize emails. Address the customer by their name in your winback emails. Addressing a customer by their name is a simple yet effective way to let the reader know you’re talking to them rather than a nameless, anonymous customer. The personal touch works to boost customer loyalty.
- Optimize email subject lines. The subject line of your winback email offers a place to get creative, but it’s easy to stick with simple thoughts and emotions and get the point across. The classic “we miss you” and “we miss you already” instantly make an emotional connection with the reader.
- Stick to the point. Don’t send your customers a novel. A winback email is designed to engage the customer. They don’t want a thousand-word story on why your company is awesome.
- Perform A/B testing. A/B testing is a process where you send two different communications to your inactive subscribers. Doing so, especially when you’ve never sent a winback email before, can help you figure out what strategy is more effective at boosting customer engagement.
- Offer incentives. There’s nothing quite like a sale, freebie, or coupon to inspire customers to act. You might offer a free eBook, create an email course, or publish a webinar. You don’t necessarily need to offer product or service discounts, but they may help lure lapsed customers back to your website.
Metrics to track the success of winback emails
Tracking the right metrics helps you figure out whether your re-engagement email is actually working or if you need to adjust your approach. These numbers tell you who is opening your emails, taking action, and coming back to your business.
Monitoring these key performance indicators over a certain period gives you a clear picture of how well you're reducing customer churn and bringing people back into the fold.
Open rates and click-through rates
Open rates show you how many people are actually reading your winback emails, while click-through rates reveal who's interested enough to take the next step.
If your open rates are low, your subject line probably isn't grabbing attention. If people are opening but not clicking, your message or offer might not be compelling enough.
These two metrics together give you insight into where customers disengage in your email, so you know exactly what needs fixing.
Conversion rates and ROI
At the end of the day, you want to know if your winback campaign is actually bringing customers back and making you money. Conversion rates tell you how many recipients went from reading your email to making a purchase or completing whatever action you wanted them to take.
ROI shows whether the time and resources you're putting into these campaigns are worth it compared to what you're getting back in sales from customers who purchase frequently after returning.
Unsubscribe and complaint rates
Not every winback attempt will be successful, and that's okay. Unsubscribe rates tell you how many people are ready to cut ties completely, which actually helps you clean up your email list. If these rates spike suddenly, it might mean you're sending too many emails or your messaging is off.
Complaint rates are even more serious since they can hurt your sender reputation, so keep a close eye on these numbers to make sure you're not annoying people more than you're re-engaging them.
Design and schedule winback emails with Mailchimp
Winback emails can help you re-engage inactive subscribers and ensure you don't lose them as customers. Writing an effective winback email should come naturally and easily when you focus on the reasons clients engage with your brand in the first place.
If you're ready to create your winback campaign, Mailchimp has the tools you need to get started. Effortlessly design a professional email with our easy-to-use platform and automate emails to ensure recipients receive winback messages at just the right time. With our marketing tools, you can boost customer retention and create valuable connections with your clients.
Key Takeaways
- Winback emails help you reconnect with inactive customers at a fraction of the cost of finding new ones.
- Personalizing your messages with customer names, past purchases, and behavior patterns dramatically improves your chances of getting people to open and click through.
- Automation handles the heavy lifting by triggering emails at the right time based on inactivity levels.
- Measuring metrics like open rates, conversions, and ROI shows you what's working and what needs tweaking in your winback strategy.