Generating qualified leads and getting people to sign up to your website is a feat that must be celebrated but now you need to keep these customers active. eCommerce vendors often forget to nurture their customers after sales, this leads to a huge backlog of inactive customers dangling around on your database. Time to re-engage inactive customers effectively.
Inactive customer email campaigns are there to reduce the turnover of customers, increase revenue, and increase profitability. These types of emails are also known as re-activation, re-engagement or win-back emails and they are as precious as gold dust.
The six inactive customer cardinal sins to avoid
Have you attempted to create an inactive customer campaign and failed to re-engage your existing customers? There are six common pitfalls that eCommerce owners often make that you need to avoid.
1: One size fits all – Wrong. If you are sending a blanket email to each inactive customer with the same content then you are going to fail, all customers are different. Segment your audience list based on customer purchase and browse behavior. A customer that has purchased one item of a large value and then another customer that made frequent small purchases have different needs that need to be addressed separately.
Inactive customer campaigns should include several win-back variations, each with its own segmentation and timing. Send a win-back email to customers who signed up for a newsletter, but have failed to make their first order within a two-week period with a time-bound coupon, or send an email to customers who have previously placed frequent orders, but haven’t purchased in the last 60 days with a discount code off products relevant (personalized) to their previous purchases.
2: One email and you are done – You gave up quickly! How many times have you received emails from a company that you’ve purchased from and have ignored them because they aren’t relevant at the time or you simply just didn’t have time to open them?
Persistence pays. Being persistent without being a pain is simple. For each of your segmented audience types create up to four different emails with slightly different subject lines, calls-to-action and timing.
3: Lack of content personalization – You think you may have got to grips with segmenting your lists but what you may have forgotten is to personalize the content. Including the customers previously seen products from their past visits with your website further personalizes the content to the individual and makes the customer feel special.
Create personalized content by extracting data from your website, this may reference previous orders, or most popular items viewed by the customer. Remarkety can extract this data directly from your website and dynamically insert into automated emails.
4: Not making emails worthwhile – Feeling loved in the consumer sense means getting some form of incentive. Incentives are more cost effective than the cost to obtain new customers. Fact! Not many customers will return after a period of absence if you aren’t offering them a good reason to return.
5: Not testing – Test several different variations of your emails, test the subject line, calls-to-action and incentives. If you don’t know what triggers a response in your audience, you will never succeed. Test only one variant at a time so you can measure the response and know that this is the reason for the change in email performance. Once you can pinpoint a clear winner, then you can set the email as your default email.
6: Forgetting automation – You can’t send all these different campaigns manually. (Well, you can, but it will take forever!) Even if your store only has 200 customers, this type of work is painstakingly time-consuming. Implement an automated email marketing platform that will send emails at set trigger points. Set up a time flow, segment your lists and create content for your emails and let Remarkety email marketing tools do the rest.
Generating qualified leads and getting people to sign up to your website is a feat that must be celebrated but now you need to keep these customers active. eCommerce vendors often forget to nurture their customers after sales, this leads to a huge backlog of inactive customers dangling around on your database. Time to re-engage inactive customers effectively. 
