4 Smart Ways to Win Back Your Disengaged Email Subscribers

If a customer hasn't opened one of your emails in months, how can you win back their attention?

By John Turner, founder of SeedProd

Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your audience. One problem that business owners and marketers suffer from is disengagement. How do you keep consumers interested in your products or services when they haven't opened one of your emails in months? 

Rest assured. I'm going to show you four clever tricks that will help you solve this problem by getting more people to open your emails.

Create an irresistible lead magnet. 

Marketers generally use lead magnets as a way to convert website visitors into email subscribers. The most common types of lead magnets include exclusive discounts or pieces of content, such as a free e-book. If you notice that your open rate is dropping and want to reengage with those subscribers, try sending out a lead magnet. 

Segment your leads by how long they've been inactive. Segmentation is an essential part of creating personalized offers and discounts. Reengagement emails won't make sense if you send them out to people who are currently interacting with your business. Imagine getting an email titled "We Miss You" when you're waiting for a delivery from the company. Odds are, you would think twice before placing a purchase in future. 

I suggest segmenting inactive customers based on a one- to three-month time frame. In other words, if someone hasn't opened an email from you in two months, they will see your reengagement campaign. Create an offer like a "buy one, get one free" or 25 percent off their next purchase. The goal is to entice the subscriber to revisit your website, which translates to additional traffic, sales and engagement. 

Ask for feedback.

Customer feedback is vital to the growth and success of your business. Reviewing what your biggest fans and critics say about your service can help you fine-tune the customer experience and create products based on their needs. 

However, gathering feedback from your inactive email subscribers is equally effective. If you send out the lead magnet and don't get a response within a week, send out a second email that asks what you can do to bring them back. When someone feels strongly about something, they will let you know. 

When consumers respond to your feedback email with a request, see if you can make it happen. For instance, if someone is looking to buy in bulk, you can offer a substantial discount, depending on how much they plan on spending. 

A/B test everything. 

If you don't know the value of A/B testing, now it a great time to learn. Essentially, A/B testing is when you make one small change to your campaign and test that change against your existing layout. The goal is to see if you can make a small change -- to your headline, call to action (CTA), CTA placement, offer, etc. -- that yields significant results. 

These rules are used when getting new visitors to subscribe, but you can experiment with A/B testing using the segmented lead list you created. Let's say you want to see if the wording in your headline is causing users to avoid your emails. You could create one campaign where you say, "We've missed you," and another where you say, "Was it something we said?"

Once the emails go out, measure your results to see if there's a significant increase in open rates using the new headline. Based on the results, you'll have a template for future disengaged consumers. 

Throw a Hail Mary. 

Finally, you can throw a Hail Mary and tell subscribers that you'll remove them from your email list if they don't respond within 30 days. You could create a sense of urgency by using 14 days, but anything less sounds desperate. 

In this email, include a link that subscribers can click to confirm that they are still interested in your brand. You could take this as an opportunity to make them an irresistible offer, like 50 percent off if they order in the next 24 hours.  

When including a promotion, make sure it's optional. If the consumer feels like it's absolutely mandatory that they buy something to stay subscribed, they may let their time expire before they are scrubbed from the list. You may want to trigger the notification after the subscriber clicks the link to stay on your list. 

A healthy email list is one of the signs of a successful business. If you want to improve your email strategy by reengaging with existing subscribers, these tips will get you started. As your lead list grows, begin split testing various ideas, and fine-tune your campaign for exponential growth.

John Turner is the founder of SeedProd, the most popular coming-soon page solution for WordPress used by over 800,000 websites.