When it comes to email marketing, there can be highs and lulls in the amount of customer engagement. This can be down to various external factors, as well as issues closer to home. But if the lull is becoming more of a consistent situation, it may be time to start re-engaging your customers. It might be necessary to employ new tactics in a bid to inspire your customers to recommend you and complete testimonials, as well as share your content with others.

Stay relevant

The type of content you are sending out to your customers is one of the key things to get right. There’s very little point in sending mountains of content if none of it is relevant to your mailing list. This sort of email marketing will probably result in increasing numbers of people not bothering to open your messages. It’s important to create quality content, not huge quantities of it to keep your customers engaged. The content you send doesn’t necessarily need to be brand new, it needs to be relevant. It can be worthwhile to find out what has performed particularly well in the past and use that as a stepping stone for the future.

Be bold

If you have lots of inactive subscribers, they will eventually start to impact on your figures and statistics. Address these inactive users as part of a re-engagement campaign to see if you can garner some activity from them. Personalisation is incredibly useful to show subscribers you care. Send them content tailored to their individual circumstances to make them sit up and pay attention. For example, an email sent in the run up to their birthday can show you’re actively involved with them, giving them the opportunity to see the potential of your marketing.

Similarly, incentivising customers can be a particularly effective way of re-engaging people who have only recently become inactive. Offering a voucher or a discount can encourage customers to become involved with your content once again, making for a very successful re-engagement campaign. If these incentives are made exclusive to subscribers, the feeling of inclusion can actively encourage sharing, further expanding the reach of your campaign.

Stick to the basics

Sometimes, the simplest changes can have the biggest impact. The day of the week, or even the time of day that your content is delivered can have a huge effect on the level of engagement. For example, sending content on a Friday afternoon may have lower levels of engagement. With staff often leaving early on a Friday and having several emails to check on a Monday morning, many will delete marketing emails immediately. However, sending something on a Tuesday morning could have higher levels of engagement, with people tending to have slightly more spare time at the start of the week.

Offer your loyal customers a reward for engagement. If you introduce a loyalty points scheme, this can encourage consistent engagement and boost the levels of interaction by your customers. Increased amounts of sharing may boost your customer base in the long term. Similarly, getting rid of dead weight can have a positive effect on your campaign. Try sending a refresher email to customers who have been inactive for six months or more. A polite ‘we have missed you’ message may be enough to re-engage them. However, if you still receive no response, it may be wise to delete them from your list. To have a positive impact on your engagement statistics, remove non-engaged customers, as well as undeliverable addresses.