4 Tips for Crafting Irresistible Winback Emails

62% of your customers are ignoring your emails at any given point, a figure that can be painful to see. And while this is an average ignore rate for most businesses, it’s still important to do something about it, which is where winback emails come in. Winback emails serve to rectify two key problems—the issue of neglecting potential customers who could be buying from you, and the issue of how sending emails to inactive subscribers slowly affects your deliverability. Winback emails don’t have to be difficult to implement and are necessary to slow down churn, which is why below we’ll go over a few important tips for crafting great winback emails.

Keep It Simple

It can be tempting to let your lost customer know what they’re missing with a lengthy product offer or a chunk of text begging them to come back, but this could actually turn them off—and that’s if you can even get their attention. Customers who are already unengaged aren’t interested in reading too much copy. If they’re gracious enough to give their time by opening your email, they’ll want something quick and eye-catching.

Visuals can be quite useful to rely on. Pictures will always catch people’s attention faster than words, so if you have a product that is best sold with visuals, you should lean into that more. For example, Dinnerly uses a picture of a yummy-looking meal to draw their lost customers’ attention, pairs the image with a subtle “Give Us a Second Chance?”, lets the customer know the last time they used Dinnerly’s service, and offers them a $10 coupon code. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Watch your Subject Lines

Subject email lines may seem easy enough, but they do require a distinct level of discernment. Think of subject lines as the first line of offense, the siren singing at the edge of the shore, drawing your customer in from the cold—in this case, not to their demise, but to be rewarded for sticking with your product or service. If your subject line doesn’t sing the right song, you’ll just be singing to deaf ears. 

But what does the perfect email subject line look like? You probably already know that it shouldn’t be too long. 6-7 words or 41 characters seems to be the sweet spot. To start, you can use a simple “Your Shopping Cart Misses You” or “It’s Been Too Long, Friend”. These will let the customer immediately know what the email is going to be about and can pique their interest enough to open the email. However, there’s something even better you can include in your subject line. 

Everyone loves a good offer and letting your customer know exactly what you’re offering in the subject line will only make them more interested. For example, you can say “$10 Off your next purchase” or “You Just Saved 10%”. These subject lines are much more specific than a “We Miss You” and the more specific the better. 

Have a Winback Campaign

As with most things in life, success requires repetition. In this case, that doesn’t mean bombarding your customers with the same winback email over and over again until they’re eager to unsubscribe. But it means that you may have to try a few different ways of getting their attention. Three to five emails are generally suggested in a winback campaign. This may seem a bit overkill, but having this amount allows you to try a variety of methods to gain your lost customer back. If you wanted to only do three, your first email could be a simple “We miss you” email that’s just reminding the customer that your company is still here and most importantly here for them. The second email could be an offer, giving them some kind of coupon code or a free month on their subscription. And if this doesn’t work, you can finish your campaign with the “last chance email”, letting them know that if they don’t engage in some kind of way, you’ll have to unfortunately take them off your list. 

If you wanted to do a 5-parter, it would also be beneficial to add a feedback email, asking the customer if there’s anything your business or products can improve on. Your very last email would then be an Unsubscribe email, informing the customer that you’ve taken them off the email list but they still have one very last chance to get back on by responding to the email.

You would also want to space these emails out, with at least a week in between each, but, depending on your company, it could even be better to wait a month or more in between sending the emails.

Test and Re-assess

Don’t expect to get your winback campaign perfect in the beginning. You may craft what seems like an irresistible series of winback emails, but you might find they’re still not getting opened or your calls-to-action aren’t being touched. This is why testing and re-evaluating your approach is necessary. You’ll want to do a decent amount of A/B testing—testing different subject lines, sending out your emails on different days or times, changing around some of the copy in the email, switching out a CTA or offer. But most of all, you need to do what works best for your brand. A business that sells running shoes isn’t going to have the same customer base as a streaming service that offers vintage movies. Learn as much as you can about who’s buying from you and apply that knowledge to help remind your customers of why they trusted in your brand in the first place.

For more tips on how to create engaging, highly-effective emails, check out our article on How to Make a Great First Impression with email!