If you’re like most companies, your primary focus is on new sales. What you’re missing is a huge opportunity to acquire new customers at a fraction of the cost of a new sale. Re-engagement campaigns are the single best way to build your sales funnel with minimal time and investment.
The Targets
1. Engage with Previous Customers. Most B2B companies have a list sitting around with customers from five years ago that had a great experience but didn’t end up needing the service or product after the initial purchase. This list is an easy target for a re-engagement campaign. Reach back out to these previous customers and start a conversation. The goal is to catch the people who are in the middle of making another buying decision and get your brand front and center of their decision making process. This starts with a simple conversation around what are they doing now. Here’s an example of a re-engagement email that got one client a 200% pipeline increase:
Hi {FirstName},
I just wanted to reach out to you because we haven’t done business with {Company} in a while, and we like to keep in touch. We really enjoyed working with the team back in {Year}, and we’d love to help support any upcoming initiatives and help implement new strategies going forward. We’ve been expanding our services and capabilities here at XXXXX since we last worked with {Company}, but our commitment to sustainability remains. We aim to be more as an extension of your office instead of just a vendor.
Let me know if there’s anything we can help bring to life, and we can set up a time to chat.
Best,
XXXXXX
2. Build Your Sales Pipeline. If you’re running a basic CRM or email system, you can probably find a large list of previous sales prospects in the last three years who didn’t convert for one reason or another. This is a great opportunity to reach out and give them an update on the latest capabilities of your product or service. More often than not, the response will be “we didn’t know that you offered that.” This is a great way to get them back into the sales funnel and actively engaged with your brand.
The Content
3. Meaningful Content. If you think about what kind of content you actively engage with, it’s probably not when someone sends you an email about their latest award or product. Sure, you’re happy for them, but it’s not going to move the needle on engagement unless it connects with them on a personal level. Ask yourself why a prospect would care when developing new content. If you can’t answer that question, it’s probably not a good piece of content to send. Sending out lower frequency but higher quality content performs much better than lower quality, high volume content when re-engaging.
4. The Personal Connection. Building a personal connection with an old client or sales prospect is the easiest way to start a conversation. Instead of a “look at our new accomplishment” email, try a “what’s new with you?” email. This moves the focus of the outreach from telling them about products and services to engaging on a human level. The more personal an email sounds, the better a re-engagement campaign will perform.
The Systems
5. Automate It. Properly using your marketing automation system allows you to deliver personalized content to the right targets. This can be done manually in your email client, but most people don’t have time to build the segments in a spreadsheet and then make sure the merge tags are properly formatted. Marketing automation makes personalized messaging at scale possible. Create custom segments for your previous customers and engage them with content that speaks to them on an individual level. The time it takes to properly segment and develop personalized messaging pays off in multiples down the road when you are looking at the results of your re-engagement campaign.
6. Timely Follow-Up. If you’re committing to a re-engagement campaign, make sure that you have the resources available to follow up when responses are received. There’s nothing worse for your sales pipeline than running a re-engagement campaign and not following up on responses for over a week. Aim for a response within a few hours of receiving a reply. This keeps you top of mind and leads to a significant bump in your re-engagement campaign success.