The rules of email re-engagement

Don’t re-engage until you understand engagement. This may be stating the obvious given that engagement comes before reactivation in the email customer lifecycle. However, before you plan a re-engagement strategy for those inactive customers and subscribers, you need to truly understand how they had engaged with your brand in the first place.

Lifetime value of products is key
The best way to look at this is your own customer lifecycle and the lifetime value of your products. Every brand is different, and one size does not fit all. Look at the selection of products and services you offer and the lifetime value they offer.

Perhaps you’re a car company. The lifetime value of a car can vary between five and 20 years. Or perhaps you’re a coffee shop company who have some customers buying coffee on a daily basis. The lifetime value of your products or services is an important factor to consider, not just for reactivation, but throughout your consumers’ relationship with you.

Spareroom.co.uk: a successful re-engagement strategy
I recently received a Spareroom.co.uk email, a flat and house share website which allows people to search for and advertise spare rooms. Being still relatively new to London, I’m often moving about to find which area I like.

At the time when I was looking for new place, I interacted with Spareroom a lot, searching and responding to many adverts. This included creating an account and signing up to daily alerts so I had the new adverts straight away. I had responded to an advert for renting a room in a flat for a six-month period, which is where I subsequently stayed.

Despite having a positive experience with Spareroom and trusting it as a brand, I had not used the website since my heavy period of engagement. This was simply because I had not needed to, as I was happy with the room I had found on the website previously and did not need to look again.

Spareroom waited for the right time to reactivate me
A month before my six-month tenancy was up for renewal, I received an email with the subject line “Time to Move on?”. This caught my attention as it was a month before my contract was ending, so the email was timely and I was immediately engaged.

When I found my accommodation six months before, I unsubscribed from the daily alerts Spareroom had been sending me. Spareroom used this information I provided, so think about your re-engagement strategy in advance, so you can ask the relevant questions upfront.

The first sentence read “Six months ago you used SpareRoom.co.uk to find a new flatshare - we hope everything worked out OK?”. Again, Spareroom used my behavioural information to make the campaign relevant and personal to me as a user of the site.

Spareroom incentivises reactivation email
Not only was it timely and relevant, but also incentivised, offering a 10% discount for Early Bird access, when you get to see and respond to the new adverts a week before anyone else who is not paying.

Certain offers and add-on service are a good thing to consider if your signature product has a particularly long lifetime value. For example, GHD’s signature product is its hair straighteners, which usually have a two to five year shelf life, however the brand always has other hair products to email about.

In summary, engagement is the foundation of re-engagement; you need to understand how your consumers engage with your brand, products and services. Use what you know about their engagement through data provided. Finally, understand your products and their lifetime value, so you can then plan a great reactivation strategy.

Sian Brookes is a member of the DMA Email Marketing Council @dmaemail

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