Bringing Dead Leads Back to Life with Email Marketing

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Key takeaways

• Re-engage cold leads with a four-step email approach: segment by subscriber behaviour, run targeted drip campaigns, redesign emails and ask for interaction or referrals.
• Segment contact lists by sign-up date, location and behavioural history (or lack of it) to create messages that actually resonate.
• Use drip campaigns triggered by subscriber activity. Begin with a personalized message and follow with automated emails and special offers to rekindle interest.
• Redesign newsletters around five elements: an action-oriented subject line, brevity, supporting imagery without slowing load times, social-share buttons and a clear call-to-action (CTA).
• Asking dormant subscribers for interaction or referrals can keep your brand top of mind and generate responses.

Introduction

Regardless of whichever industry your brand calls home, virtually every company can agree on at least one thing – having a lead “go cold” feels terrible. However, just because you’re facing down a dormant connection with a potential customer doesn’t mean that you’re completely out of luck. With the following tips and tactics leading the charge, you can rest easy knowing that your brand has all of the tools it needs to bring even the coldest lead back to life via a healthy dose of email marketing CPR.

Segment Your List According to Subscriber Behavior

To kick this process into high gear, The Huffington Post’s Larry Alton points out that learning more about your audience and their behavior is vital to the success of this approach. Specifically, Alton suggests segmenting and defining each portion of your contact list based on their unique needs, desires, and habits. Sign up date, location-based data, and behavioral history – or lack thereof – all fit into a successful take on contact list segmentation.

While this might not seem like a proactive stance on bringing leads back to life and fostering new opportunities initially, that mindset couldn’t be farther from the truth. Having a fundamental understanding of what resonates with these contact list members ensures that you build and craft marketed messages that actually generate a response – and a conversion later on down the road. Without this foundation, you’re doing little more than taking shots in the dark as you try to recapture cold leads.

Build an Enticing “Drip” Campaign

The next step to leveraging this segmentation insight comes in the form of creating a “drip” campaign that appeals to each unique silo of audience members. If you’re not familiar with this particulars of this approach, a drip campaign usually consists of multiple messages that trigger based on the activity of the person on the other side of the screen.

Naturally, you’ll need to start with a personalized message that hones in a subject that relates to your segmentation data. From here, enticing the viewer with automated emails and special offers throughout the various stages of this reemerging relationship helps pave the path to renewed interaction.

Redesign and Enhance Your Emails

As for your newsletter and other standard email assets go, Jonathan Pavoni of the HubSpot Blog suggests giving these offerings a redesign. By enacting this strategy, you can catch the eye of your dormant lead, all while fostering more activity from the rest of your contact list as well.

So what makes for a great newsletter or email template redesign? Pavoni zeroes in on the following five aspects as key members of the overhaul process:

• Subject Line – Focus on a subject line that requests an action or addresses a significant problem, concern, or topic.
• Brevity – Nobody wants to read a novel in their inbox. Keep things short and concise as a way to engage these fringe leads.
• Imagery – Reinforce the message of your content with a powerful image or graphic; just don’t go overboard and bog down load times via multiple inclusions.
• Social Integration – Incorporate buttons for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, etc. Giving your viewer options to share and discuss your content on their favorite network is a powerful way to boost interaction.
• CTA – Show these leads how to take the next step and connect with your brand via a powerful and straightforward call-to-action (CTA.)

Following these guidelines does require some effort and hard work on your end of the equation. However, the reaction from the cold lead portion of your inbox audience is well worth the time and energy that goes into a dedication email content redesign.

Ask for Referrals or Other Interaction

Finally, don’t be afraid to send off a request for interaction or even a referral for other interested consumers to this segment of your contact list. It might seem like a crazy “swing for the fences” approach initially, but RIS Media’s Patty McNease explains that enacting this strategy is actually a surprisingly effective way to keep your brand at the forefront of the conversation and generate a meaningful response. At the very least, this method shows viewers that you’re more than willing to reach out even when the discussion trails off at times.

Facing down dead leads in the inbox is never a fun experience. However, with everything you’ve learned here helping to reignite this once lost spark, your brand should having no trouble regaining the attention of these wayward consumers and forging a relationship that’s not only active, but enriching for both participants as well.

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