Don’t let your customers fall off. Re-engage with email. Here’s how.

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Really Good Emails

7 min readOct 27, 2017

So it turns out that it’s so super vogue for online marketing to repeat, return, revise, re-market, re-engage. Let me repeat myself. Let me rehash this. Okay you get the point. Where does the power of “Re” come from? Why do marketers need to have a re-engagement strategy in place?

Source: Giphy

You won’t be able to sell anything on the first meeting in most cases. People need to meet with your brand, product or offering various times before they would make the first purchase.

According to Nielsen Norman Group customer journeys are much more dynamic and interconnected these days, meaning that companies need to have a concise communication strategy in place on all their channels.

Good news is that you don’t need as many touch points with a customer who already bought something from you, and had a pleasant experience with your service and/or product as well.

We are so hot for email right now. We think it’s one of the smartest channels to re-activate hardly earned customers. Besides great email design, what makes a re-engagement email successful?

personalized images and content
segmentation based on behavior or time
(product) recommendations that are relevant and specific to the customer
urgency and a clear CTA or a message that promotes action

Personalized images work like a charm

Personalized images are powerful especially if paired with custom offers like Airbnb did in this email (we like using NiftyImages).

The overall design of the email is nothing special indeed, but still it’s standard for the brand, it’s very lightweight, simple and easy-to-consume.

Besides the main goal of the email, Airbnb included a secondary call-to-action as well, that aims to provide information about what the “superhost” badge means for travelers.

If you want to optimize for conversion you might not want to involve a secondary call-to-action. But if you want to avoid being too pushy, it definitely makes sense to have something additional to say besides trying to sell.

But you don’t need images all the time

Instead of featuring a large hero image in the top Skillshare get’s to the point with a big bald title saying: We’ve Missed You!

Their goal is to re-activate a previous premium user with a unique discounted offer. That’s what the call-to-action button in the email emphasizes as well.

Also they use use urgency words like “limited” and “ends soon” — a bit of FOMO, to make their users act now.

Besides the offer they add three new product features to back up why it’s worth becoming a premium user again.

I think it would make sense to add some social proof to the email template as well, like:

number of paying Skillshare users
feedback from at least one reactivated customer (who used to have a paid subscription, and was convinced to become a paid customer again)
reference to friends/connections who have a paid Skillshare profile

What if we get rid of even more images?

This email from Kickstarter is sent to project owners who already successfully fundraised on the platform but forgot to update their projects for a while.

It’s both time and behavior triggered, and since there’s nothing Kickstarter would want to sell, it lists useful tips and hands-on advice.

Kickstarter knows pretty well that post-funding communication is essential for both backers and project owners:

a project owner will come back to the site to interact with the backers
and backers will do the same, and most likely when they login to Kickstarter again, they will be presented with other projects to back

It’s a win-win situation, even if there doesn’t seem to be a benefit for Kicstarter. Believe me, there is!

Like this so far? Press the 👏 and recommend it. It will let us know if we should continue to write stuff like this in the future as well as help others find it.

Add some fun using animated GIFs

Animated GIFs have been around for quite a while, and are used regularly by email marketers. Actually according to a study by Experian, 1 in 2 email marketers use animated GIFs in email marketing.

Yay or nay for animated GIFs? You decide, but check out the below stats before making a decision:

Dell managed to lift their revenues by 109% using animated GIFs
For MyrtleBeachGolf.com GIFs increased the click-through rate by 13% and 21%
While Helzber Diamonds generated 288% sales lift with animated, personalized emails

Besides the smart use of animated GIFs and really good email design, all of these emails are either time or behavior triggered. That’s what makes them really engaging for the receivers.

Animation simply works best when paired with segmentation and personalization, both of which require you to use marketing automation.

But even if you send very timely and targeted emails you can’t use animated GIFs in all your email templates for sure.

Personalized offer + static images

You have to find other ways to stand out from the crowd, and make your emails memorable and actionable even when using static images. How?

With advanced tracking and smart product recommendations based on other users’ purchase history for example. This email by Brooklinen is sent to customers who browsed the site couple weeks ago for given products.

The email includes personalized offers based on the browsing history of the receiver and product recommendations also. The goal is to convince the receiver to make a purchase now and enjoy free shipping.

If you are still on the look for a bed sheet, why wouldn’t you take action after receiving this email?

Both the design and content is captivating enough to make it an email template worth mentioning.

There’s only one note to add: that the background image in the hero unit might not show up on Outlooks. Unfortunately background images are not supported in all email clients.

Here’s another example from Jet, which features a big bald hero unit with a discount that would be hard to miss.

They know perfectly that it costs less to keep a customer than to capture a new one. That’s exactly the reason why after the first purchase they offer a 15% discount on the following two purchases.

It’s not only a captivating offer for a new customer, who just made the first purchase, but a very smart one as well.

Why?

Many customers, especially price sensitive ones, will fill up their cart with a bunch of things to get the most out of the 15% discount (maximum amount is $25 per purchase).

By the time they finish the two following orders they can easily get used to Jet and become a regular customer even without further discounts.

Plus if Jet uses advanced email automation, they will be able to collect bunch of data about the customer, and make great product recommendations based on their purchase history in future.

That’s what I call smart.

Maybe they could experiment with involving personalized offers based on the first purchase already in this email.

Besides that they could also implement some sort of referral system — spiced with a bit of gamification for example — where they could incentivize people to invite friends and family to the platform.

Of course there are various other ways for you to re-engage your customers.

These examples are just a small slice of the whole picture, but still they seem to follow similar trends and:

include personalized messaging and offers,
take advantage of segmentation based on behavior or time,
feature relevant product recommendations,
and have conversion centric, timely call-to-actions — in order to urge users to act now

But nothing is carved in stone. Be brave to experiment from time to time. There’s always room for improvement.

For example you could add some social proof to your re-engagement emails — to back up why others use your product or service.

I hope the above tips and examples will help you to come up with high converting re-engagement emails in future.

I would advise you to start right away by optimizing your order confirmation emails — especially if you have an e-commerce business.