A customer has shown interest in your brand? Don’t get too excited. They may forget you in a minute or (if you are lucky enough) a bit later. Once this happens, they will stop opening your emails, answering your calls, and placing new orders. Actually, according to recent statistics, if 77% of brands disappeared, nobody would even care.

So what can you do to get into the ‘noticeable’ group of brands that customers actually care about? One of the solutions is to enhance your marketing with re-engagement strategies. This will help you constantly stay in touch with the target audience and keep customers from leaving. As soon as customers show the first signs of disinterest, you should gently convince them to change their minds. Remind them about their store credit, offer discounts on products saved to favorites, send a customized selection of new arrivals, or anything else.

With marketing technology, you can tune up your re-engagement strategy and make it automated. In addition, modern tech solutions allow using channels that were previously rarely used for re-engagement. Today, thanks to the reduced lead time of automated direct mail, you can leverage its benefits for agile remarketing. Inkit has already done that and wants to share the experience. Continue reading to discover:

• What is customer re-engagement?
• What re-engagement channels are the most commonly used?
• NatureBox’s Case Study. How Inkit’s direct mail made customers convert

What Is Customer Re-Engagement?

Re-engagement is a marketing technique used to reactivate dormant customers that have previously interacted with a brand. They may have started a subscription, ordered a product, subscribed to a social media profile, clicked a specific button, etc. The type of interaction is less important than the fact that these customers stopped using your services.

Re-engagement strategies aim to bring back inactive users and make them convert. As a result, a brand gets more loyal customers and significantly increases sales.

One of the key components of effective re-engagement is timing and accuracy. You need to test your first remarketing attempts to set up the most appropriate schedule. It will vary depending on your products and services. With marketing automation software, creating a re-engagement timeline and sticking to it is easy.

What Re-engagement Channels Are the Most Commonly Used?

After decades of struggle and bloody fights for customers, marketers have singled out several effective re-engagement approaches. You can use each of the listed channels separately or combine them. But don’t forget about the balance – too much re-engagement is counterproductive.

Re-Engagement Marketing Channel #1: Re-Engagement Emails

Since email lists naturally degrade by about 22.5% per year, email re-engagement is essential. It helps companies provide customers with useful content that keeps them loyal and stimulates conversions. Affordability is another reason why this channel is so popular. You don’t need a lot of money or time to send emails. Besides, there are plenty of email automation tools that can deliver highly-targeted marketing content for you.

Re-Engagement Marketing Channel #2: Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs)

If you have ever added anything to your cart or favorites but didn’t complete the purchase, you have seen such ads. Dynamic product ads are usually used by online stores to re-engage buyers. They showcase the products that an individual interacted with but didn’t buy. It’s a great chance to rethink the offer, take a closer look at the product, and buy it. Dynamic ads are often paired with emails that serve as an additional reminder linking to the related items.

Re-Engagement Marketing Channel #3: Automated Direct Mail

Although direct mail is a more expensive re-engagement channel if compared to emails, it boasts a 5.1% response rate compared to 0.6% for email. This means that customers are more likely to react to a re-engagement mail piece than to an email. The development of marketing automation has changed the usual form of direct mail. Today, you don’t need to spend several weeks or months waiting for mail design, printing, and delivery. By integrating a marketing platform with a direct mail automation tool like Inkit, you can launch an automated trigger-based mail. The software will automatically track user behavior and initiate printing and mailing at the necessary moment. Recipients will hold postcards in their hands within a few days.

NatureBox’s Case Study. How Inkit’s Direct Mail Made Customers Convert

We know that the practical side of direct mail re-engagement causes many questions. This approach is still less common than email remarketing (which gives you a competitive advantage, by the way). Check out this case study to learn from the experience of others.

Company: NatureBox

What they do: NatureBox is a company that provides healthy snacks approved by nutritionists. The service is offered on a monthly or annual subscription basis.

What problem NatureBox wanted to solve: At some point, many customers started to ignore NatureBox’s emails and unsubscribe. As a result, the company couldn’t reach out to customers and needed to find a new alternative channel of communication.

Why direct mail for customer re-engagement: Carly Coleman, the Director of Retention at NatureBox, knew that direct mail has higher response rates than emails. That was an excellent chance to get through to customers that were sick of email marketing. The company used direct mail for customer acquisition before, but this time, they decided to try another approach.

Why Inkit’s mail automation tool: NatureBox was dissatisfied with its previous mail campaigns because it took too much time to launch. Hence, the company was looking for a solution that could minimize mail time-to-market. At this point, Inkit’s representatives contacted NatureBox and offered to try mail automation software. NatureBox was able to see how direct mail remarketing works in practice and test everything thanks to unlimited batch size. Besides, they were interested in the integrations supported by Inkit and planned to run a trigger-based mail campaign in the future. These advantages convinced NatureBox to start using the mail automation software provided by Inkit.

Inkit for re-engagement postcards: Starting the cooperation with Inkit, NatureBox pursued two key goals: quick and timely launch of a mail re-engagement campaign; and a decent ROI. With Inkit’s support, the company managed to deliver the first re-engagement postcards within one week.

NatureBox used the concept they had previously developed for emails to see how it works in direct mail marketing. The company targeted disengaged customers with a store credit, sending them mail pieces they could redeem.

NatureBox designed a two-sided appealing postcard asking customers “What’s new with you” and promising some good news. The reverse side included the store credit of a specific customer and an additional bonus. That was a great reminder of NatureBox’s benefits and a valid reason to come back.

The results: NatureBox evaluated and analyzed the results of the test campaign to understand whether the investment paid off. There were two groups of customers: one received re-engagement mail and another didn’t. When the company compared the data on the mail recipients against the holdout group, it found out that:

• Revenue per customer increased by 60%
• Orders per customer grew by 35%
• 8.9% of customers who received postcards redeemed the offer

As a result, NatureBox has remained satisfied with Inkit and plans to continue using mail automation in future campaigns:

“We send direct mail ‘blasts’ right now, but anticipate both time savings and increased effectiveness from launching direct mail ‘triggers’ in our CRM (Carly Coleman, Director of Retention at NatureBox)”

Want more details about NatureBox’s case study? Visit this page. Or better subscribe to Inkit and start testing it in your marketing campaigns right now.