Hello from the Other Side: The Win-Back Email
We’ve been talking a lot lately about the importance of segmentation and using data to drive engagement and reduce churn with existing customers. Pauline Brown of Dataiku, recently published a great article featuring four steps towards customer loyalty leveraging data science.
To recap, if you’ve been in business for a while you’ve got a ton of data on your customers — put it to good use with segmentation! By separating your customers into sub-groups, you can tailor content and send the right message at the right time to increase engagement and drive sales.
Pauline goes on to say in her article that you should develop a scoring system for your customers to help segment and apply the most appropriate marketing strategy for each. An example of her scoring system is:
Loyal customers: Take no action.
Potential churners (customers you want to keep): Send a special offer via email.
Churners: Send a special offer via email.
Ambivalent (unsure whether to keep): Send a simple greeting without an offer.
At Sendwithus, we are big fans of a win-back email to keep people engaged but are big believers that only a portion of your audience should receive a coupon or other discount. Giving too many discounts or sending someone coupons all the time can train your customers to be price sensitive or simply wait for a discount offer.
Lemme upgrade ya
A great option for a win-back offer is to present something other than a dollar off discount — and this email from Nice Laundry is a great example. First, they are upfront with the offer by including details in the subject line itself: “We Miss You. Enjoy Priority Shipping On Us.”
A free shipping offer with an order threshold is a great option to re-engage customers. You’re still making a sweet sale without completely giving away the farm. Of course, this shipping cost has to come from somewhere, but you also don’t train your customers to hunt for a discount or de-value the product itself. On top of that, by providing an offer window of a couple of days, you create urgency around the offer rather than a standing “come back please… whenever you wish.”
Coupon Overload
Like every other working millennial in a big city, I’m a big fan of food delivery. Long gone are the days where the only option is a delivery pizza from a big chain, now you can order food from almost anywhere! In a market like San Francisco where vendors are aplenty (Amazon Restaurant delivery, Grubhub, Caviar, and UberEats to name a few) competition is steep. A go-to for me is Eat24, a partner of Yelp.
What is interesting to me is that without fail, Eat24 sends a $2 off $10 order coupon every weekend (and let’s be honest, I expect them). I order from them fairly regularly, so this isn’t a win-back, it’s just a weekly discount:
With the San Francisco market specifically (as well as other big metros like Seattle, New York, and LA to name a few), you can order food from the same restaurants across many delivery companies. If it’s the weekend and I know I’ve got my weekend coupon discount, I would order from Eat24 over Grubhub or the others, simply because I could get the same food for slightly cheaper.
In this case, while I had a couple year’s worth of $2 off weekend coupon emails in my inbox, Eat24 is beginning to test their strategy, including different subject lines:
The subject line still includes the word coupon (main reason to open the email) but they are experimenting around with a few jokes. In general, Eat24 has great, playful messaging, encourages people to binge watch Netflix, even suggesting #nopants as a common reason to order in. In addition to subject line testing, I’ve observed a few offer tests in the past several months. These segments are a perfect opportunity to test varying discount amounts to preserve margin.
The first example was an offer I received as a result of a chicken wing order I placed in October from my neighborhood chicken wing joint:
As a result of my 8/4 order (and not a previous June or future September order from the same restaurant), a couple of days later I received a sweet $5 coupon! What is most interesting to me, is that Eat24 sent me two follow up emails after the initial send (6 and 7 days apart) and the language of the emails changed.
In the first email, Eat24 told me that I could use the coupon to reorder from Wing Wings, but in the second and third — they encouraged me to use the coupon code for any restaurant found on Eat24 (both off of a minimum $10 purchase). What’s more interesting, is that the coupon code is the same across all three emails as are the Terms & Conditions — the coupon was always available to be used at any restaurant, not just my wing joint.
As a marketing nerd, I would love to see the test results*, coupon redemption rate as a whole as well as over time in correlation to the email sends and change in messaging (seemingly opening up the coupon discount to any restaurant). If I was going to run this test myself, I would target a segment of people who had ordered from a restaurant for the first time rather than a repeat purchaser, like me. I of course was grateful for the coupon (and obviously used it, I may or may not have buffalo sauce on my mind right now), but I’m a repeat purchaser and not really a potential churner. Remember what I mentioned earlier? There’s no need to give away revenue if you don’t have to.
One last Eat24 coupon variation is one I just saw a few weeks ago, just before the Super Bowl. In addition to the standard $2 off $10 purchase and funny messaging, they included a larger coupon offer for $10 off any order of $50.
This coupon is the same ratio discount (20%) as their standard coupon offer but provides an option to order lots of food to support people gathering to watch the big game. Whether they are testing subject lines, targeting offers for specific purchases of experimenting with larger coupon discounts to encourage a higher spend — I look forward to watching Eat24’s win-back and coupon strategy evolve.
Wrong timing, wrong message
Clearly is an online retailer for contact lenses and glasses and in this email — they do a lot of things right, but there’s also something majorly wrong — the timing for every customer. While I do not have an inside track to the email marketing plans of Clearly, I can tell you that this email did not resonate with my coworker:
I actually quite like this email — it’s direct and uses personalization by referencing the exact product my coworker previously purchased. Further, the email is timed to be sent to someone six months after they purchased a “six month supply” so ideally — this message would hit the right person at the right time, the holy grail of segmentation.
Unfortunately, not everyone uses contact lenses the same way. Some people wear their dailies more than once, others end up wearing their glasses half the time — and an option would be for Clearly to have a question in the profile setup for customers to identify the frequency. By adding one little question, Clearly can add that piece of information to the signup process, then onto their database, and use that new dimension of their data to improve the timing of all future emails. Another option is to go the way of Amazon or other retailers, where there’s an option to click from the email, postpone the “refill” message to a future date you then select on a webpage. Otherwise, and what is happening with my coworker, is that with each additional “you’re out of lenses” message that gets delivered prior to that time — the message falls flat, and the recipient can become annoyed.
There’s a definite art and science to win-back offers, but getting it right can mean a big win for your business: “a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.” You win some you lose some — but never give up on segmenting and testing those win-back offers to customers that may be on the verge of churning. A straight dollar discount isn’t always the ticket to getting someone to come back, don’t give away more revenue than you have to, and segment to make sure the message is right for every recipient.
*Eat24 did not respond to contact attempts to discuss the results and strategy of these email campaigns. If you’re Eat24 and you’re reading this I’d love to talk!
**The coupon codes included in this post were pulled from previously sent emails and are all expired.
