When it comes to promoting or growing your business online, mailing lists and email campaigns offer massive benefits. However, many business owners overlook one of the most powerful ways to utilize these tools. While building your mailing lists and capturing customer information is important, analyzing your existing customers and re-engaging them can turn a one-time transaction into a lifelong customer. Email marketing companies specialize in this. There are plenty of ways in which to accomplish this goal. These tips offer easy to deploy ways to bring back past customers time after time.

Why Re-engage Existing Customers

Existing customers are an important part of any business. If they have done business with you before, you automatically know they are in your target audience. Hopefully, the experience was positive. This overcomes part of the hurdle of gaining customer trust. Finally, you know about them based on their purchases, services ordered and any other information you might have stored. This makes it simple to create a targeted, efficient campaign to bring them back. Compared to all of the unknowns of advertising or sales lead generation, existing customers are the perfect candidate for engagement.

Benefits of Re-engaging Customers through Email

Choosing how to best re-engage your existing customers can be tricky. Many of your options will depend on the type of business that you run. However, email offers a number of distinct advantages to most businesses. Major reasons to choose email over other services include:

  • Cost: Even the most expensive email services often offer delivery fees far lower than standard mail.
  • Speed: Instead of waiting days or weeks for customers to receive a flyer, postcard or mailer, emails are delivered near instantly.
  • Ease of Access: Most email services offer quick template generators and other services to make optimizing your email campaign simple. There is no need for custom printing, copy editors or graphic design teams. Just format your message and send it on its way.
  • Advanced Targeting: Many email services allow you to customize delivery in detail. This means that you can target delivery to fit your demographic or time it to coordinate with an upcoming promotion with ease.

When to Re-engage

With easy access to analytics, auto-mailers and an abundance of information, many small-business owners are swimming in a sea of information. Using this information efficiently can help to increase the chances of interaction with a client and improve your relationship. Make the wrong move and you could potentially lose a client. An easy way to determine if it is a good time to check in with a customer is to analyze your current interaction trends. If one or two customers disappear from time to time, it could be as simple as a vacation or other life event. The last thing a customer wants is to come back from a relaxing vacation to an inbox full of inquiries. The best time to start re-engaging customers is when you notice a real trend. This provides information and may allow you to target your efforts more specifically.

How to Re-engage

While communication alone might help to bring back earlier customers, there are four things that you can do to increase your chances of success.

  • Re-establish trust and communication: Personalizing the email using the customer’s name or mentioning their previous purchases can show that you have in interest in them, rebuild trust and remind them of their previous experience.
  • Offer a promotion or incentive: This will vary based on your business. Popular options include discount coupons, free trials of new software releases or early access to new products. Sometimes a little nudge can make a huge difference.
  • Ensure that your sales team or staff is aware of these promotions and incentives: This will make the next interaction with the customer a positive experience and encourage future interaction.
  • Follow up and stay in touch: By interacting with these clients regularly, you can avoid having to go through this process in the future.