4 Strategies to Win Back Email Subscribers
How do you shift through the endless amounts of emails in your inbox each day? What really catches your eye before you navigate to something new? Even the hippest, most successful brands and the best email marketers get unsubscribes. Here are ways to monitor your unsubscribed contacts and those who don’t engage… and what to do next!
What is a win-back campaign anyway?
Win-back campaigns (also called re-engagement campaigns) can change a passive, unengaged audience to an active audience. These campaigns help boost your brand presence, nurture relationships with key audiences, and ensure valuable content. It's all about value.
Win back campaigns can influence user preferences based on trends or opportunities in the marketplace. These contribute to the greater good and purpose of your key performance indicators. They also optimize your email marketing program to generate better frequency and reach.
Strategy 1: (Data-Supported) Knowledge is Power!
Your subscribers are overloaded with information every day. In order to stand out in a crowded inbox, it’s important to focus on the right messaging for your target audience. Knowing your target personas and regularly monitoring your data will help you adapt to changes within your audience and optimize their subscription experience. Remember that the ultimate goal is to maintain engagement. Think about sending a re-engagement email or hyper-topical campaign to keep your audiences focused.
A re-engagement email is a creative way to get in front of subscribers who have stopped opening and clicking on your scheduled subscriber emails. It’s also a great way to test new messaging that pulls audiences into your brand. This could be through giveaways, bold subject lines (don’t be afraid of an emoji!), reviews, or news.
Pro Tip: Skip the guilt trips!
Some brands try to be funny or too clever with unsubscribe messaging but it can come off as harsh and tone deaf. Making your audience feel guilty for their lack of engagement just turns people off of your brand. Stay focused on the benefit and value of your campaigns instead of the guilt.The example below from Women's Health is especially lame.
Strategy 2: Consider Churn
Churn is the natural and unintentional loss of subscribers.
Churn can happen for a number of reasons over time. A subscriber may be unhappy with their content experience, overwhelmed with the amount of emails, or they simply weren’t that invested in engaging with your brand when they signed up.
For subscription-based services, this could be due to an unintentional missed payment. Limit this by setting up a grace period with reminder emails so individuals have an increased likelihood of seeing and understanding their subscription payment dates. Most e-commerce platforms have tools and email marketing integrations that will help with this set-up.
Be sure to watch out for the following indicators when you suspect your subscribers are churning:
Audience Increase or Decrease of Email Usage: Monitoring your subscribers’ activity can help mitigate withdrawn consumers. Make sure to compare this data to actively engaged subscribers to understand the ideal frequency.
Audience KPIs: Make sure your email subscription is contributing to both your audience’s and your organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs). If a certain brand messaging strategy is building interest and loyalty, keep using it! Those subscribers opted-in because of your content and the way it makes them feel. Maintain consistency across all of your platforms.
Be Timely with IT Issues: No one wants to deal with online technical problems—especially right now. Reduce consumer stress by reporting any issues immediately and remain in contact with individuals who may need help resolving this.
Strategy 3: Win Back Lost Followers by Letting Subscribers Take Control
Using a variety of marketing channels can successfully convince people to change their minds. This is crucial when analyzing how to win back lost or absent subscribers. An email preference option (often called a subscription map) allows your audience to monitor how much content they want to see! This has potential to create long term engagement and alleviates email saturation of product updates and offers. Giving your subscribers the opportunity to curate their email experience enhances loyalty.
Make sure your email subscription features are flexible by allowing your subscribers to upgrade or downgrade whenever they want. They might stay onboard if they can choose to only hear from you monthly instead of weekly.
Gifting is a way to give audiences free trials, infographics, ebooks, or exclusive videos. This tool can help you reach out to recently unsubscribed audiences or those who decided to cancel your service.
Use content as a form of retention by checking in with your subscribers. Highlight content that displays your brand’s personality and gives subscribers a chance to feel connected! Target subscribers who are inactive with your content by segmenting their timeframes. These timeframes can help you group individuals who aren’t interacting with your content the way you’d like. Having these individuals in a separate group can help you come up with individualized strategies that may spark an engagement. Base these timeframe strategies on the last time they opened your emails in the past six months.
Know Who Your Consumer Really is.
When an inactive subscriber connects with your brand through their other behaviors, this triggers an action that can help the subscriber reconnect with you. For example, if I see an email from Pinterest with recipes that I have recently looked into making, I am more likely to engage with that email and, as a result, use Pinterest.
Knowing your audience’s behaviors can help create ways to retarget them based on their social habits. As a consumer, I am now likely to navigate towards Pinterest based on my recipe success and the fact that they noticed I hadn’t been on their application for some time.
It's True: Variety is the Spice of Life!
Position alternatives to subscribers around your brand's value proposition. This value proposition should be defined as you build campaigns and subscription journeys for your audience. Look at ways to adapt to consumer data by social listening and media monitoring. Social Listening is a component of audience research that involves examining your brand's social channels, as well as conversations about your brand or related topics, in order to develop strategy. Social media monitoring is a method to help monitor questions, hashtags, and press within your content. Watch competitor media outlets for mentions in their articles and content. Tracking how consumers interact with your competitors provides value to your organization by building an understanding of the audience outside of your segmented context.
Strategy 4: Develop Personal Connections to the Brand
Connect to your subscribers by showing the personality behind the work! This gives an incentive for users.
Using this strategy is simple - highlight your team members’ faces, names, and a quote or fun fact. This allows your audience to visualize and connect with the brand by seeing you’re more than just an email.
Aerie does a creative job incorporating the inspiration behind their latest collection,using these individuals to infuse both Aerie’s personality and the individual personalities. This helps audiences see how the brand connects to real people who may be just like them.
Aerie is a perfect example of a brand that integrates their audience’s lifestyles into captivating marketing and advertising efforts from diverse audiences. They specifically do a creative job incorporating the inspiration behind their latest collection, using individuals to infuse both Aerie’s personality and the individual personalities. This helps audiences see how the brand connects to real people who may be just like them.
Strategically placing your email content based on your audience’s interactions can help motivate stronger engagement and acknowledge the shifts in their interests or needs.
In a world where Zoom meetings have become the new normal, consumers crave emotional connection more than ever. Express who your organization really is by showcasing the individual personalities that make up your team! People are more likely to engage with a photo of a person looking at the camera and smiling ( just say no to flat lays) because they connect to expression. There are numerous ways to incorporate this into the content you produce.
Engagement is crucial to motivate consumer action. Make sure you fully understand who your audience is digitally in order to connect with them at a larger scale. Personalize your emails and remember to reevaluate your loss of subscribers. As your audience evolves your content needs to evolve. Create a strategy that enhances re-engagement but also stays transformative in your industry.