Few things are more frustrating than nurturing a lead up your sales pipeline, building a relationship, and then seeing them ride off into the sunset without making a purchase. There can be many reasons for a lost lead; however, just because they didn’t convert that first time doesn’t mean they’re lost forever. Knowing how to build a re-engagement campaign can be an effective strategy to bring some of those lost leads back and to get a sale.
Marketing automation can be key to optimizing this strategy. For example, you can retarget your CRM-segmented lists on your favorite advertising platform thanks to a simple integration, such as:
Let’s delve into the best practices to follow when building your re-engagement campaigns.
What is a re-engagement campaign?
To understand what a re-engagement campaign is, we first need to understand the meaning of a lost lead.
A lost lead is an inactive customer who may have come to you through one of your B2B lead generation funnels. They may have been at different stages of your sales pipeline and relationship building but haven’t gone any further with the process. Rather than give up on that customer forever, a re-engagement campaign seeks to bring them back into your sales and marketing funnels.
If you are a SaaS business, those leads may even have progressed as far as a free trial but no further. Whatever the reason for your lead being lost, it is also lost opportunities. Re-engagement campaigns seek to look for ways to engage them again and to hopefully convert them to a sale.
It’s a marketing strategy that will use various tactics such as incentives and special offers. If you have high-quality data on lost leads and customers and have already created CRM-segmented lists, you can also re-engage them with personalized CRM retargeting campaigns that increase your chances of reigniting the relationship.
Re-engagement campaigns can not only boost a business’s revenue, it can also improve its conversion and engagement rates.
The cornerstone of an effective strategy is usually your email marketing, which can act as the catalyst for further engagement. Let’s look at the role email can play in a re-engagement campaign.
How to manage a re-engagement email campaign
You already know that email is an effective marketing tactic and can generate an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. As well as lost leads, you might also decide to target subscribers who have become inactive.
Your initial main message when it comes to any re-engagement email campaign should be: do you still want emails from us? There are a few ways you can make your email campaign more effective:
- Segmentation: Separating customers into categories is one of the best ways of ensuring your B2B lead generation strategies are successful. Not just in prospecting but in re-engagement, too. It allows you to send targeted and personalized messages, especially for those customers who haven’t opened an email for a while.
- Subject line: If people haven’t been opening emails from you, you want an attention-grabbing subject line that will change that behavior.
- Incentivize: Tempt people back into your pipelines with offers and discounts.
- Great content: There’s little point in getting people to open an email unless you’re offering relevant and engaging content.
- Simplicity: In the initial stages at least, you don’t want to overload people with too much content and calls to action (CTAs).
- Optimize: Analyze what works from an initial round of emails and tweak where necessary.
- Automate: You may have thousands (or more) targets on your re-engagement list. Use automation where you can.
One valuable source of information is your CRM system. This can provide information on any previous interactions with or purchases from your business.
One thing you can do when it comes to both your email strategy and a wider re-engagement campaign is apply geographical location to your segmentation tactics.
Win-back emails can be a type of email that will work for you. Think about the email subject and monitor your click-through rates (CTR). You want to see engagement rates rise and any formerly unengaged subscriber who comes back should be counted as a win.
Seven re-engagement campaign best practices
The first thing to understand is that not every lead will convert, far from it. Conversion rates can vary by industry and can be as low as 1%. But when your sales team is constantly on the lookout for new qualified leads, that pool of lost leads can be a potentially rich source of customers that may just need that little extra to change direction.
You should always consider why the customer didn’t proceed to a purchase. You may have sent them an automated email survey (or they may have completed one on your website) and you could see if they identified any pain points from that or on your CRM (customer relationship management) system. But, as you move forward, there are various tactics you should include in your campaign.
1. Get feedback
Getting feedback (if you haven’t already) can be a starting point in reigniting your relationship with them. In some ways, this may be your most valuable tactic as it can help identify pain points or issues they may have encountered.
2. Incentivize
Depending on where they were in your sales funnel, a customer may just need a gentle nudge to get them across the finish line. One great way to achieve that is to incentivize the process. There are various ways you can do this, and you can gauge the effectiveness of each by monitoring the relevant KPIs and metrics.
Some things you could consider include:
- Free trial. If they haven’t taken up one before, offer this. If they have, offer an extended trial.
- Discount. Discounts can make a real difference, especially if their issue has been with pricing. You could also offer discounts on future purchases or any peripherals and on product recommendations.
- Webinars. If you run webinars on any related subject, offering free access can be a good incentive.
- Ebooks/manuals. As with webinars, you may sell specialist e-books or manuals and can offer them to the customer at no charge.
3. Added features
One reason why they may not have converted is that your product lacked certain features they wanted. The playing field may have changed since that decision and any added features can be highlighted. It may well be that new features will meet their needs. You should also look at their purchase history with your business to see what they like.
4. Evidence
The last time the customer interacted with your brand, perhaps they weren’t convinced that your product could live up to the sales hype. By offering social proof, you may be able to demonstrate just how effective your product can be. Some forms of social proof you could offer them include:
- Testimonials and reviews from clients.
- Case studies that demonstrate the product’s effectiveness and how it boosted customer satisfaction levels.
- White papers that look closely at your product.
- Independent websites that have carried out a product comparison with yours being a high scorer (or the highest).
If using case studies or testimonials, try to use real names but only when you’ve sought permission first.
5. Share valuable content
You’re not only re-engaging with a lost lead, you’re rebuilding (and hopefully progressing) your relationship with them. In some cases, that might be a slow process that can’t be rushed. As well as social proof, you may want to share relevant or exclusive content with them. You can also share related content such as third-party blogs. The whole idea is to make them rethink their decision to leave.
Decide where you’ll share this content, too. Will it purely be based around a re-engagement email campaign or will it incorporate the various platforms you use? Tactics such as running Facebook retargeting ads or LinkedIn retargeting campaign may produce positive results. As mentioned, creating segments based on location can help with both email and social media targeting. And, if you leverage automation to keep your CRM-segmented lists always connected with ads targeting features, you will be all set to start new campaigns.
Take things slowly at first and send a single email. You don’t want to bombard your customers with emails and offers. Think about what they want and need and what pain points they may have experienced (and you can ideally solve). Your re-engagement campaign should be as wide-ranging as any previous marketing efforts and recognize that not only are there different core wants and needs, but also that people will have different reasons for disengaging.
6. Fear of missing out (FOMO)
FOMO can be a great tactic that may persuade a formerly lost lead to convert. It’s not a case of looking back on the previous relationship but looking forward and adding something to the deal that may make the customer reconsider. For example, you could offer a 10% discount but make it a time-limited offer. The customer may experience FOMO and decide to buy and may even become a loyal customer.
7. Automate workflows
Chances are your team has a lot of leads flowing through their funnels. Keeping on top of cold leads, prospects, and existing customers is time-consuming enough. Throw in the efforts required to re-engage lost sales leads and your time and manpower grows exponentially. And yet it’s absolutely worth the effort.
So, what’s the solution? Automate, automate, automate.
You may already use marketing automation for lead generation to find new leads in the first place. But you can also easily automate all of the best practices we’ve explored, from collecting and analyzing feedback to sharing relevant content and sending out discount emails.
Implementing automated tools throughout these workflows doesn’t only save time. It means each of these tactics will be perfectly timed and tailored to your audience, reducing the chances of lost leads slipping even further out of your reach.
Integrate all of the automation tools you use for the best results. Even automated systems will have their limits if you don’t ensure they are connected to each other. Integration means each platform “talks” to another, drawing on relevant data the system stores to provide real-time updates and make messaging even more effective.
LeadsBridge integrates with the biggest advertising platforms, connecting different data sources like your CRM or email marketing software with LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and TikTok. This allows you to boost audience targeting by syncing your CRM segments or email marketing lists with each platform. You can then build custom audiences for your lost leads and engage them with retargeting ads wherever they are in your funnel.
Automating the process for you, LeadsBridge ensures custom audiences are synced and updated, adding or removing contacts from ads as needed.
The takeaway
Build your re-engagement campaign around email re-engagement and you can then move to other forms of engaging with your lost leads. See where you can fill the gaps that existed previously and may have led to the customer disengaging.
Keep track of the relevant metrics such as sales revenue, engagement rates, and conversion rates to see if your tactics work. To make the most of your resources and speed up results, automate as many stages of the re-engagement campaign as you realistically can.
Make sure to integrate all of your chosen systems and platforms, using tools like LeadsBridge to automatically sync customer data and campaigns for more effective retargeting. Discover LeadsBridge integrations for audience targeting today.
