How to Create A Win-back Email Program: Insights & Examples

If you’re settled on forging meaningful, long-lasting relationships with customers, lack of engagement can be upsetting. 

Yet, customers do show some disinterest after their first purchase. 

Having worked with over 600 brands in the last ten years, we are aware just how upsetting such disinterest can be. But with the right win-back campaigns, you can successfully re-engage lapsed customers, and this blog post explains how to do that. 

So let’s get started by understanding the significance of win-back emails beyond revenue generation. 

Significance of Win-back Emails

5 Win-back Email Examples

11 Win-back Email Strategies

Significance of Win-back Emails

Re-engaging, and thereafter converting, those on the outskirts of your tribe can lead to: 

• Improved customer retention: You need sufficient customers first in order to make your tribe tangible. Besides, customer retention is (famously, might we add!) more cost-effective than customer acquisition.
  
• Prolonged brand loyalty: Not just profits, loyal customers are your future brand ambassadors, too.
  
• Increased brand evangelization: Rather than funneling crazy loads of money into influencer endorsements, your brand evangelists can and will happily do the work for you. Being associated with a good brand reinforces their own status.
  
• Reinforced brand perception: What your customer chooses to say about you shapes how your brand will be perceived by those outside the tribe. This would initiate a positive buildout.
  
• More soft conversions: When “people” become your audience, that’s when a soft conversion occurs. These are the new members of your tribe, and they’re not acquired by excessive ad spend. 

But, speaking solely in terms of numbers, repeat purchases can boost revenue generation considerably. “Customers who are about to stop buying from you are one of your most valuable customer segments. They’ve already made at least one purchase. And, the profit margin for repeat purchases is incredibly high,” states Mike Arsenault, founder and CEO of Rejoiner. Hence, win-back emails tend to be a brand’s most profitable campaigns— as Mike insists. 

There is a legal constraint as well: Canada’s anti-spam legislation, or the CASL. 

The CASL categorizes consent into two types: implicit and explicit. 

If you have implicit consent for a contact, you have 2 years to gain an explicit consent. The two-year window is your chance to re-engage subscribers before they are lost forever. So there you go. You have all the right reasons to launch a win-back campaign. 

We’ll get down to what winback strategies you should consider. But first, let’s explore some intentful win-back email examples. 

5 Win-back Email Examples 

1. Rumpl

On the creative front, persuasion is the central pillar of a win-back email, both in terms of design and copywriting. 

For instance, check out this win-back email below. 

Source: Email Love

Rumpl’s win-back email is persuasive, respectful, and full of intent. In fact, the level of intent is what sets this email apart. 

Some of the standout features of the above email include: 

• The hero GIF’s appear/disappear effect is spot-on. 
• The two-column layout to display the alternative choices. 
• Brilliant piece of email copywriting. 
• Campaign-optimized, prominent, well-padded CTAs. 

2. Clif Bar

Next to persuasion, most brands incentivize their win-back emails. “Since these are repeat customers, you can afford to make an offer that’s better than most first purchase offers. This makes buying from you again a better bargain than defecting to another brand. A good incentive makes sticking with your brand a no-brainer,” as Arsenault points out. On that note, take a look at the email below. 

Source: Email Love

Clif Bar’s win-back email stands out for the following reasons:

• Color blocking and bold text are not just attention-grabbing, but they promote intuitive info-gathering as well.
  
• Clear, incentives-on, and actionable CTA buttons.
  
• A compelling, urgency-perceived hero text, which an equally relevant image complements. 

3. Eleven

Since the possibility of a first-time open triggering a second-time open is high, you need strong hooks to win contacts back. 

Speaking of hooks, the copywriter has their job cut out. We talked about incentives just now. However, mentioning an offer right in the subject line might, in the case of win-back campaigns, backfire. The spotlight on what’s essentially a sweeter deal can strike the recipient as cheap. If you’re not qualified to ace it, you can always fall back on design exclusively to do it for you. 

Take a look at this win-back email in order to understand it better. 

Source: MailCharts

Here’s how Eleven’s email stands out in terms of a powerful hook:

• The hero image is the singular force of this email. The racquet over the model’s face captures the essence of estrangement perfectly; the memory-fade-out effect is right on the money, and the simple text overlaying it gives it the finishing touch.
  
• The email is too focused on “winning back” to waste any more pixels by adding secondary/tertiary content tiles.
  
• The single CTA and the bottom navbar seem to be inevitably terse as well as useful analytics-wise. 

4. Sourse

If you want to include the win-back offer in the subject line or the pre-header, try to make it humorous by being upfront. 

This is what Sourse does in their email subject line: We’ll give you 25% off to open this email 🤑 Check out the rest of the email where they continue the jest while being respectful to user choice.

Source: RGE

Some other things which stand out include the following:

• The minimalist approach narrows down the focus of the email to feature the bare minimum required of the contact.
  
• The template is awash in Sourse’s brand colors— a reminder of the brand’s essential identity for the recipient’s benefit. 

A win-back email is not where you experiment with design. Rather, you stick to what captured the subscriber the first time. 

More generally, sticking to your identity is what that entails. 

At the same time, bear in mind the minimalist approach need not be aimed at all of your inactive subscribers. 

Let’s consider another—our final—example to flesh this out. 

5. Graza

There are different types of inactive subscribers. Ergo, your emails should be designed according to “segmentative logic.” 

Litmus has identified three kinds of subscribers as follows: 

1. Never-actives: Subscribers who never engaged with your email from the point they signed up.
2. Lapsed inactives: These are subscribers who not only do not engage with your emails but have stopped buying as well.
3. Current inactives: These are current customers who have not been buying of late. 

Coming back to design, to what extent you should experiment will be determined by the segment you’re designing for. 

For example, check out this win-back email example from Graza. 

Source: Email Love

Here is a fun, quirky re-engagement email aimed at the segment of current customers who haven’t bought in a while. 

The stakes are relatively low, hence the creative liberty. Below are a few other details which stand out to us: 

• Flows are a trending design trend. It motivates scrolling so the viewer can be driven to the relevant CTAs.
  
• Another instance of well-written email copy.
  
• The two-color-scheme highlights the choice scenario.
  
• High “inbox-tainment” value via guided storytelling. 

Let’s learn a few win-back strategies as recommended by industry experts, next. Keep reading. 

11 Win-back Email Strategies

Here are some win-back email strategies for you to latch onto:

1. After their maiden purchase, customers tend to wait longer than usual to buy a second time. The window between the first and second purchase is your best chance to keep the customer engaged with your brand. Stay top-of-mind, share relevant content instead of driving a hard sell.
   
2. Make an effort to discover if the purchase latency is due to some problems the customer might be facing.
   
3. Incentivize your win-back emails. This is standard practice if the customer is a lapsed inactive.
   
4. Work on your subject lines. Like we mentioned before, resist revealing discount offers in the subject line. Apart from that, you want a nice mix of emotion and urgency.
   
5. Send a series of 2-3 win-back emails if the recipient is a lapsed inactive. (You can adjust the frequency as per the categorization.) Withhold giveaways until the final email. An incentive can be a final push to win the customer back. 
   
6. Make it clear to the subscriber that your final email is in fact the final one. The subscriber might re-engage, seeing that they won’t be receiving any further emails from you. If there’s no re-engagement, terminate the series for good.
   
7. Track the relevant metrics. Andrew Kordek recommends a re-engagement-focused metric called the relapse rate. “This measure can provide insight into the effectiveness of the messaging and strategy of your re-engagement programs.” The aim is to distinguish those who re-engaged and those who lapsed for good, so that you’re more focused strategically.
   
8. Kath Pay recommends targeting inactives according to their buyer personalities. So, the competitive buyer and the impulse buyer should not receive the same win-back email. You need to design emails for multiple personalities.
   
9. Identify the right time to launch a win-back campaign. While you should keep the colder segments engaged throughout the year, engagement starts to pick up during year-round holidays. But timing will also depend on your niche.
   
10. Consider re-engaging customers on a different channel. Depending on how these subscribers behave on other channels, you can tailor your re-engagement efforts in order to maximize value generation beyond email.
    
11. Follow the 90/10 rule. Win-back emails should not constitute more than 10% of your daily sends.  

While strategizing, make sure the customer service team has a seat at the table, as well as the marketing and sales teams. 

Unless you’re not doing everything right, it can be difficult to find out why customers would stop engaging with your emails. The customer support personnel can help you figure out whether the problem has its source in something outside email.

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