With the modern business landscape growing competitive daily, businesses can’t afford to lose customers. Customer retention is the need of the hour. In fact, attracting new customers to your business costs five times more than retaining the existing ones.
Email marketing is one of the best strategies that help businesses win back customers. Win-back email campaigns are designed to capture the attention of lost customers (or those who are on the verge of getting lost) and re-engage them with your brand.
Sit back with a cup of tea because today, we’ll learn how to win back those lost customers with excellent email marketing. Let’s dive in!
What is a Win-back Email?
Win-back emails are basically ‘we want you back’ emails that are sent to inactive customers, contacts, and subscribers to re-engage them with your brand. They serve as a gentle nudge to remind them about your products or services.
These emails are a true gem in winning back your lost customers. Usually, it won’t happen with just one email; hence, you must roll up your sleeves and create an email sequence. Here are 4 emails you should send:
- Say hi and remind them you exist. Start your email by acknowledging the recipient and reminding them about your brand. Share updates about new launches, recent business developments, and more to reconnect with your inactive customers.
- Send a nice offer. Provide a compelling offer, incentive, or discount to entice customers and encourage them to purchase. Leverage FOMO by creating a sense of urgency via irresistible and time-limited deals and offers.
- Follow-up or ‘last chance’ email. If the initial emails we want you back don’t yield the desired response, you must send a follow-up email as a last chance to reinite their interest in your brand. Emphasize the limited time remaining for them to take advantage of the offer or highlight the benefits they’ll miss out on by not re-engaging, prompting them to reconsider and take action.
- Unsubscribe email. Lastly, when a customer decides to unsubscribe, you must respect their choice and make the process hassle-free. Send an email that acknowledges their decision and thank them for their past support. This leaves a positive impression of your brand on their minds and maintains a cordial relationship with them.
9 Win-Back Email Examples
Let’s look at the best examples of customer winback emails and get inspired for amazing future winback sequences.
1. Offer an Irresistible Deal
Discount codes and incentives are the best ways to win back lost customers. Offering an incentive can be a great motivator for customers thinking about buying from you again.
This incentive needn’t necessarily be a discount code. You can offer them other incentives, such as bonus gifts, extra reward points, free shipping, free consultation, and more.
For example, Google sent out an email announcing a free custom email address to users for three months.
Google is well aware of the importance of having custom email addresses for businesses. For customers, getting a custom email address for free for three months is a good deal to miss. The email also mentions the importance of having a custom email address, thereby convincing the customers to grab their offer.
2. Recommend Various Products
Showcase your products or services to inactive customers and encourage them to buy from you with personalized product recommendations. Help your customers discover new things and create a sense of excitement that can inspire them to check out your products and make a purchase.
You will be surprised that sharing product recommendations in your email messages can increase your click-through rates by 840%.
Here is an example of an email sent by Laura Mercier, a beauty products brand, to its customers. Notice the product recommendations the brand shares with the customers based on their frequent purchases.
Laura Mercier keeps its email simple as inactive customers wouldn’t be willing to read a lot of copy. The email politely asks the customers to revisit their website and offers personalized product recommendations. Besides, email offers customers tangible incentives to impact the customer’s purchasing decisions.
3. Educate about Pausing and Cancelation Options
If you’re a subscription-based business, educating customers about your pricing plans and how each of them works is the best win-back strategy to follow.
By informing customers about pausing and cancellation options, you give them knowledge and control over their subscription or membership. This empowers them to make informed decisions, and they may be more likely to continue their subscription or membership in the long run.
For instance, Netflix always assures regular and disengaged customers that they can cancel their subscriptions at any time if they choose to reactivate their accounts.
4. Mention the Offer in the Subject Line
Email subject lines play a crucial role in increasing open rates. In fact, 33% of customers admitted that they open emails because of these catchy subject lines.
Mentioning discounts in the subject lines is another excellent way to motivate customers to open your emails. It helps your messages stand out, compels your customers to view them, and delights them into making purchases.
Check out this email from Barista & Co, a UK-based coffee roaster, to its subscribers, offering them a treat. The minimal design gives this email message a clean look. Further, it piques the recipients’ curiosity by not revealing the offer right away.
Barista & Co. uses an engaging phrase ‘free gift’ in the subject line that acts as a very compelling CTA and encourages customers to open the email. The email lacks fluff and delivers the intended message without beating around the bush.
5. Re-engage inactive Customers with a Seasonal Campaign
Leverage the timing and context of a particular season, event, or holiday to tap into customers’ associated needs and emotions and re-engage them. Align seasonal email campaigns with various seasons to offer customers compelling deals.
For example, Freshly, a meal delivery service, announced a $60 off a week before its black friday sale. In its email, Freshly explained how this discount would be divided over 4 orders, thus encouraging the customers to shop throughout the week to be eligible for the discount.
Freshly diverts its customer’s attention to its offering before the Black Friday sales actually begin. It keeps its customers engaged with this amazing offer, thereby remaining on top of its customer’s minds during the sale season.
6. Send Follow-Up Product Recommendations
Sending follow-up product recommendations to customers is yet another powerful way to personalize their shopping experience and increase the likelihood of a repeat purchase. Analyze your customers’ purchase history and browsing behavior to send targeted follow-up product recommendations and enhance customer experience.
For example, Good Eggs sends emails containing new product recommendations to customers.
7. Invite Customers to Visit Your Stores
Inviting customers to visit your stores offers you an excellent chance to revitalize their interests and foster a sense of personal connection. It allows you to highlight new products, limited edition collections, and more to generate curiosity among customers.
For example, Starbucks sent out an email informing its customers about the happy hour at their store. In other words, Starbucks invited its customers to visit their stores and grab exclusive deals on drinks, food items, and more.
This email is the best way to inform customers about the exclusive benefits and experiences Starbucks has in store for them. Starbucks creates an opportunity for its customers to rediscover its brand, build stronger relationships, and enhance its brand-building process. This email itself can help the brand attract new customers while encouraging existing ones to visit their stores during happy hours.
8. Create Urgency
One of the oldest selling tactics, creating urgency, still manages to encourage customers to make purchases. The feeling of FOMO plays a significant role in driving customers to make decisions instantly. Create a sense of urgency in your emails by setting deadlines, offering hard-to-get deals, or solving an unpleasant problem.
Here is an offer from Birchbox, a beauty subscription box. The brand announced a freebie item on all purchases above $29 for a limited duration. This urgency pushes their disengaged customers to take immediate action.
The freebie product incentive acts as a strong magnet for attracting customers. And this deal is available for a limited time, creating FOMO among customers leading to quicker purchases.
9. Promote Free Shipping
Did you know that 49% of customers don’t complete their purchases because of additional costs, such as shipping fees, taxes, and more? Free shipping allows you to get back to these customers and encourage them to finish their checkout process.
Send out an email announcing free shipping to your customers, removing a potential barrier to their purchases. Craft your subject line to explicitly mention this offer.
Design Within Reach, a modern furnishings and lighting store, sent out an email announcing free shipping across their entire store for a certain time period. Besides free shipping, the store offered an additional discount of 15% on certain items. The offer – free shipping and discount is too good to miss.
The email subtly mentions the availability of the deal and thus creates a ticking clock to encourage customers to place their orders. It gives customers an option to choose from a variety of their offerings.
8 Win-Back Email Optimization Tactics
Here are a few email optimization best practices you can follow to create highly engaging win-back emails for your customers.
- Personalization—Address your customers by their names to add a personal touch to your emails. But that’s not all. Let them know that you care about them with personalized recommendations, exclusive discounts, and more. This will help boost customer loyalty.
- Timing – Analyze your customer behavior to identify the right time to send these we want you back emails. Timing plays a crucial role and increases the likelihood of customer re-engagement.
- Strong subject lines – Optimize your email subject lines to convey your message simply yet compellingly. Create a sense of urgency and curiosity to grab the recipient’s attention and entice them to open your emails.
- Audience Segmentation – Categorize your customers into various segments based on their purchase history, account activity, preferences, engagement levels, and more to build more targeted win-back email campaigns.
- Clear CTA – Include a clear CTA in your email message to guide recipients with further actions. Include concise copy, visually appealing buttons, and a clean design to capture their attention. Moreover, you can take help from a freelance graphic designer to help you design an appealing CTA.
- Gathering Feedback – Offer your recipients a chance to express their concerns, share reasons for their inactivity, or their experience with your brand, and identify the causes of customer disengagement and design strategies to win them back.
- Cross-Channel Presence – Be available for your customers across all channels, such as email, social media, live chat, SMS, phone, or more, to build strong relationships with them and boost customer loyalty.
- A/B Testing – Create different variations of your email messages by tweaking the subject lines, email content, images, and CTAs and send them across to two different sets of customers. Monitor the performance of each of these emails to choose the one that delivers outstanding results.
Wrapping Up
Win-back campaigns are extremely effective in re-engaging subscribers. By leveraging personalization, strong subject lines, clear calls to action, gathering feedback, and conducting A/B testing, you can maximize the impact of your win-back email campaigns. Remember, these campaigns should be ongoing hieve the best results.
With the help of necessary tools, such as CRM, customer support software, email marketing software, cloud security platform, and more, you can store, manage, and track customer interactions to build effective customer win-back campaigns and scale your business.
We hope the examples of win-back emails we shared in this post have inspired you to design and create your own customer win-back emails.
