By Marcus Roth, Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content.
In my experience guiding successful email campaigns to unengaged contacts in their sales database, I’ve noticed that financial advisors treat the task like they’re being forced to eat their vegetables or take out the trash. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed some businesses begrudgingly perform this task only when reminded and directly supervised. However, running these campaigns can be the difference between hitting your marketing and sales goals, or falling short.
Often when running an email list, you will find yourself with unengaged users who, if you’re following email best practices, will be sectioned off in their own unengaged segment. About once a month, you should try to send an email to this segment to revive some of your unengaged prospects and return them to your normal newsletter mailing list.
If you’re willing to pay money for top-of-funnel leads through Facebook marketing and Google search, then you could consider remarketing to your unengaged database a free form of advertisement. Your message will likely be ignored by a substantial percentage of the database, but for those that do bite, you are getting a new lead or at least a new chance at an old lead.
How Come Targeting Old Leads Works?
Targeting old leads may yield more efficient results than targeting an entirely new lead because this old lead, who has returned to your engaged database, is already aware of your brand reputation and many other elements of your company.
Because we know the lead has disengaged with the past material, whatever email marketing we send to them needs to be designed in a way to break the cycle. This means sending an email that could ruffle feathers and at the very least need to be different enough from earlier emails to spark interest.
Sometimes we get pushback on the more aggressive marketing we use in unengaged campaign subject lines because it doesn’t seem smooth or palatable enough to align with an easy brand…
But here’s some cold hard truth – easy, smooth, and calm can equal forgettable… your old approach proved to disengage this category of leads. So, your goal is to grab attention, not get lost in the milieu of kind requests that compel nobody to take action. The issue is that your brand and your traditional way of wording things is the reason they became unengaged in the first place.
And if the language is a little too intense or off-putting for a lead after already receiving your palatable material, then the lead wasn’t right in the first place… but you’d be surprised how many people move from unengaged to engaged after their attention has been grabbed.
What Does a Re-Engagement Email Look Like?
You might be asking, “how, exactly, does the email look and feel different than my other emails?”Well, I’ll tell you…
First things first, your subject line needs to be potent, or “spicy” to use a non-technical term. See some examples here: “We Miss You…”, “We might cancel your account”, etc.
Whatever you say, it should be provocative. Then, when someone clicks on the email because they’re curious as to why the email is so extreme, the content of the email needs to immediately address their concern in a tactful, reasonable way. If you do this too aggressively, people will feel like you’re pulling a trick on them, and they will unsubscribe. But if you hit the sweet spot between encouraging and worrisome in the subject line, then supply informative, engaging content, people will click and continue to read your email.
All you needed to do was get them to open one more email for them to be back on your normal email list. Obviously, they’re not a five-star golden example of a perfect prospect because those prospects shortly turn to clients. But these unengaged leads are an example of a quality prospect who you may have met with in the past, but who decided they did not need a financial advisor at that time. But a year later they find themselves ready to retire again or in a new financial situation. By happenstance, your monthly unengaged email finds its way to their inbox, they look at it, read it, remember the conversation or content you sent them, and suddenly, your name is back in their head and they’re dialing your firm right away.
About the Author: Marcus Roth is Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content. Marcus has a unique experience in B2B and B2C start-up companies ranging from enterprise-level market research of Artificial Intelligence to self-defense eCommerce products. His experience in AI market research brought him, and his research, to INTERPOL, The United Nations and Harvard University.
