Seems odd doesn’t it? We almost get into the habit of companies chasing us for our business. We become so accustomed to receiving communications from companies, even if we did once request it and we have not really been looking at it since. I think that it takes a brave marketer to effect a change – however it seemed to have worked.
I received one of the most powerful pieces of personalised communications today. It wasn’t trying to sell me something and it wasn’t some ground breaking piece that used 6 different mediums and multiple touch-points. It was a single email, personalised simply and it would’ve normally paled into insignificance. However this piece was different …
The ‘WhatTheyThink’ Newsletter arrives in my inbox daily – and some days I look at it and some days I have to admit that it goes straight into the bin. Which is a shame, as the WhatTheyThink content is normally pretty good. Maybe too much of a good thing huh. Anyway, the words, “Goodbye from WhatTheyThink” struck a cord.
I have to admit that I thought that they were going bankrupt at first – but that was not the case…
WhatTheyThink were dumping me! They were actually going to stop sending me things! They were being conscious about cluttering up my inbox – which is the contextual equivalent of the infamous line, “It’s not you, it’s me!”.
Eric Vessels was personally dumping me. Wow!
I’m sure if it was male pride, a hurt ego or a re-vitalised interested in WhatTheyThink, but you know what?
I clicked on that link, and updated my profile bloody sharpish. I’m not having no Eric Vessels, COO of WhatTheyThink dumping me!
It got me thinking though – it’s a brave and wise tactic. Let’s look in our database and extract out all the customers whom haven’t responded to one of our communications, and let’s go out and tell them that we are stopping. It’s a win-win situation. You either win because your reduced the size of your database by removing those that have no immediate interest in you or you win because you have just reaffirmed that the people in your database are actually interested and want to hear from you.
So, if your marketing campaign is failing, and your database is full of hangers-on; then go out and tell them that you are leaving them – and see what reply you get!
[...] call-to-action in the subject line to get noticed by those that ignore you most. When you say good bye, subscribers listen! Suggestions for subject lines [...]
[...] is your final chance to get them back or lose them forever. Don’t be afraid to say goodbye. WhatTheyThink said goodbye to inactive subscribers with a straightforward goodbye message and they got [...]
I like it, I like the big red button that says CANCEL MY MEMBERSHIP. I hate all spam and don’t get advertised well to that way so any opportunity to get removed easily is nice.
[...] a post over at Dave Baldaro’s blog – check out the message itself and Dave’s reaction to it here. There are a few key takeaways to be gleaned from these two [...]
[...] your messages, but that you may want to try and re-engage. Many of our clients have gotten great results with re-engagement campaigns. For some excellent tips on how to create an effective re-engagement [...]
I’m a huge fan of conducting re-engagement strategies like this for inactive subscribers.
I also think WTT did a superior job here with their copy. Their down-to-earth, conversational approach resonates with me as I’m sure it did with folks who opened it.
This is an example of real people (not just corporate speak) talking to real people offering a smart option at the right time. Beautiful!
What a great email. Okay, I’m a bit biased, I worked at Bronto for 4 years. They have a wonderful team of account managers there and I’m sure this was the advice of my good friend Kristen Gregory. I agree that it takes some balls to send out this email, but as you said – win/win. In this case, not only did it get you to re-engage, you actually wrote about it (and shared). Wonderful success story.
Hmmm…maybe I’ll blog about you blogging about it.
DJ Waldow
Director of Community at Blue Sky Factory
@djwaldow
P.S. Thanks for sharing, Eric (and Dave)
…thought technically it wasn’t all that personal (Dear Member), but that’s tough to do when you have incomplete member information. One of the goals was to get more complete information including names. Hopefully we are successful and can start calling all our members by their names!
Thanks David! We had a few issues with this email, but overall we were pretty happy with it. It went out to just a fraction of our membership. Those who had not opened a given number of emails. Our intent was to re-engage and hopefully we were able to do that in a creative manner.
Thanks to our email provider Bronto for the help in how to do this. They gave us some great resources of others that were effective and we borrowed heavily.