How to Win Back Your Customers with a Two-Step Re-Engagement Campaign Roadmap

You know you need clean data and you know how to do this, but now how do you get more money out of the database? Our suggestion: Start a great re-engagement campaign! We’ve got a two-step roadmap to re-engagement greatness, just for you.

Before hitting the road(map) …

It’s true that Email Validation and email hygiene are excellent tools that aid the creation of high-converting re-engagement campaigns, but they’re just the beginning. And while we previously discussed the importance of deliverability, the re-engagement campaign goes way beyond a simple deliverability exercise.

Even though the best-of-the-best deliverability consultants suggest shelving inactive contacts to resolve your inboxing issues and prioritize active contacts, it’s a little shortsighted. There’s absolutely potential for your inactive contacts to be great drivers of revenue, you just need to take the time and steps to revisit those contacts and engage them appropriately.

After being in the field for so long, we know many email marketers are hesitant to start re-engagement campaigns, and there seem to be 2 common reasons they think re-engagement campaigns are risky:

1. They don’t know who’s active – is this email the contact’s primary, secondary, or even tertiary email?
2. They may not know enough about that contact – was the content they received ever relevant?

They way to create the most compelling re-engagement campaigns for former customers or engaged prospects is by alleviating these two issues in two easy steps.

The Re-Engagement Roadmap

Step 1: Identify active emails from your inactive file

You read that correctly – identify active emails from your inactive file. Believe it or not, there are active emails in your inactive file. How? Well, just because an individual was inactive with your content doesn’t mean they were inactive with other content from other brands.

Luckily, there’s a tool to help you discover those active inboxes:

Open Data

At AtData, we receive 5 million unique email open signals per month from network of email publishers. Over the course of a year, we receive 200 million known open activity emails indexed for clients to match their data.

For example, if a client says they have 1 million emails (customers, prospects, haven’t mailed in a while), they can upload that list to the platform, and we will tag 30-40% of those users who are most active openers + clickers.

From here, you, as an email marketer, will start with this group since these emails are confirmed active and primary email addresses. And just like that, you solve the first issue of knowing who is active!

Step 2: Learn more about those active customers

Ask yourself: do you know enough about your customers? How do you get the data you need to properly segment them into the right campaigns? Often, individuals discontinue engaging with a brand because the content isn’t relevant to their interests nor lives in general.

Without key data fields to paint a full customer profile, creating a compelling re-engagement campaign for these newly discovered active prospects is impossible. Trust us, if you just send the same content in the same manner with the same segmentation before the individual went “inactive”, they’ll be inactive again before you know it. So where do you get these data points?

Email Intelligence

At AtData, our Email Intelligence service helps append high-level demographic and household data points. This vastly improves personalization and segmentation capabilities for re-engagement campaigns and beyond. Just think of the possibilities for campaigns based on age, household income, and other factors that influence the content even you consume outside of your workplace!

Now that you have the tools to solve your two primary concerns about re-engagement campaigns, here’s how you’ll run the campaign.

An example re-engagement campaign

You’ve used Open Data to discover you have 400 thousand known openers rather than 1 million, and this is great – it’s a much more manageable number to personalize and segment appropriately!

From here, you would build out a 4-6 email sequence that spans 2-3 weeks with the appropriate incentive to re-engage. What do we mean by “appropriate incentive to re-engage”?

Think of it this way – those newly discovered active contacts haven’t heard from you in a while. Now that you know they’re active, you know there’s a greater chance of them opening the email you send as opposed to the truly inactive inboxes (those are just content Bermuda Triangles, really).

But just because these contacts are more likely to open doesn’t mean you go in for the big sell in the first or second email! Start slow – for example, mention you haven’t heard from them in a while, and then provide an incentive to take a look at your site. This incentive could be a free shipping code, discount code, or something else that feels inviting but not too committal.

Once your re-engagement campaign gains traction and you see increased engagement via the performance metrics in your ESP (we’re talking clicks and opens), then you can migrate these contacts to your more active cadences based on these signals.

How does this relate to hidden revenue in my database?

Based on our clients’ experiences, we’ve seen a 3-4x increase in open rate when targeting known openers. With this in mind, you can see how this is a nice, easy, safe way to generate revenue for fractions of a penny when you uncover the active records in your database as opposed to spending $1-2 to acquire a new email.

If you’re looking for additional ways to expand on revenue opportunities with these active records, why not dive into some multi-channel marketing strategies?

Multi-channel marketing with Direct Mail

A great complement to digital campaigns and a critical addition to multi-channel marketing strategy is Direct Mail! If you don’t have the addresses you need connected the digital records in your database, Postal Append provides those email addresses for you by appending postal information to a record with a relevant, related email address.

And trust us when we say Direct Mail is a great opportunity to be seen by the individual. Think of it this way – a person averages 75-125 emails per day in their inbox. Pretty crowded, right? The physical mailbox is much more open and spacious, making it less competitive and a great space for you to use as your own. Plus, there are countless companies that can help you meet your Direct Mail goals, like our friends at Lob who are experts at Direct Mail sending and conversion automation strategies.

In the end, there’s still revenue in your inactive file. You just need to follow the simple two step roadmap to give you the best possible data to begin your journey and watch the conversions roll in.

If you have any questions about Open Data, Email Intelligence, Postal Append, or just want to talk to our team of re-engagement experts, contact us to schedule a call!