3 Practical Campaigns You Can Implement To Re-Engage Your Customers and Profit

• Whether in SaaS or eCommerce, upselling customers has a huge multiplying effect on your revenue.
• Too few online businesses focus on current customers, inactive or active, as a source of increased revenue.
• Email can help you respond to and re-engage/focus in on customers that you can re-activatee or upsell.

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Most companies spend a lot of time focusing on email campaigns that will increase customer activation rates.

It’s easy to forget that customers already in your system, both active and inactive, provide lots of opportunity for increased revenue as well.

Here are three really practical campaigns you can implement today to put email to work against your current customer base.

1. The ‘hail mary’ email: Re-trial our product

The most efficient SaaS businesses still see 90% of their free trial signups never convert to a paid plan.

That’s a large chunk of potential customers. Not everyone that signs up will ultimately use your product but there is at least one campaign you should consider implementing today that can have an impact.

45 days after a customer’s trial expires, send them an email offering them a renewed free trial, along with 20% off their first few months.

This might not sound like much but there are many reasons customers don’t convert. Three that appear often are:

• The timing isn’t right (internal team priorities taking preference over your product).
• The customer is too small initially.
• The customer hasn’t yet made a decision amongst your competitors.

Here’s a great example of this campaign from Help Scout:

…and here’s another great example from Sprout Social:

It’s that simple:

• Send and email 45 days after a customer’s trial expires.
• Filter out customers that are in your ‘paid’ segment.
• Track conversions for those customers that login again.

2. Use data to re-active your customers

Data is interesting.

Ever wonder how you can regularly email customers and re-engage them, particularly those that haven’t displayed recent activity on your site?

People’s number one challenge is usually determining what they can send their customers that is genuinely engaging.

Regardless of your industry, a large portion of your customers will regularly disengage: at least temporarily and, many times, permanently. The following campaign will work for any business and is genuinely engaging:

30 days after a customer goes in active (hasn’t used a key feature or visited your site), email the customer a re-activation email that features personalised data.

To exemplify what I mean, check out this email from jetBlue:

This email does three things right:

• It uses the customer’s last destination to kick things off. Get your personalisation right up front.
• It has interesting data: it’s not just a sell.
• It does have a CTA and it’s very clear.

For an even better example, check out this from Orbitz:

• What core metric can you use about your customer? Last product purchased, number of emails sent, last Tweet added – all good examples of ‘comparable’ metrics.
• Compare your customers’ metrics to the wider toolset: make them feel proud or anxious.
• Have a call to action that relates to this core metric. Bring them back to your site!

3. Get repeat purchases: follow up on all customer orders

Every customer that orders from your store is an opportunity for a repeat purchase.

A good eCommerce store focuses on repeat purchases. Recent data shows that up to 30% of repeat purchases are directly attributable to email marketing.

20 days after a customer purchases on your store, email the customer to ask how their purchase was and mention two new, related products.

There are lots of variations on this campaign but the idea is to, first and foremost, check in with your customer and find out how their purchased product(s) are going. You can also then use the opportunity to introduce them to new or improved products or up sell on related products.

This example from Shutterfly aims to use a simple coupon to re-engage customers.

Alternately, you might mention some related products or just best sellers / new products in your store.

This campaign is usually trivial to implement and well worth the gains:

• Target customers that have purchased.
• List your most common purchases or ‘hot’ add-on products (use data to determine which products these are).
• Include a clear call to action at the bottom of your email.
• Track repeat purchases.

Conclusion

These campaigns seem trivial and they are simple to setup but that doesn’t mean they’re not powerful.

Try configuring your email marketing software to send one of these campaigns.

What other campaigns have you used to continue to engage your customer base? We’d love to hear in the comments!

Image via FineArtAmerica.