Reactivating customers using reactivation email is an important part of any company’s marketing processes. It can make a huge difference in revenue because it increases your customers’ lifetime value.
When looking at reactivating lapsed players, it’s best to make your approach as personal as possible, but if you don’t have the resources to plan one-to-one conversations and phone calls with your audience, a reactivation email campaign can be the next best thing.
According to Return Path, a typical company has a database of email subscribers, of which some 25-50% are inactive. These subscribers have shown interest in your brand, and perhaps they’ve spent some time and money with you, engaged with a welcome bonus or played for an extended amount of time. And then nothing. Tumbleweed. Silence.
This is a common scenario for iGaming brands and can happen for many reasons.
Maybe they players registered with too many similar sites and were then overwhelmed with emails flooding their inbox. Maybe they were lured away by the competition. Or they thought the content you sent them was irrelevant. These can all be problematic for email marketing, so any approach for reactivation emails needs serious thought.
No matter what the reason was, reactivating customers that have become inactive is an important part of any company’s marketing processes. It can make a huge difference in revenue because it increases your customers’ lifetime value (LTV).
What’s more, your active customers are more likely to buy more and repeatedly from you, so you want to make sure your clients stay active, and you want to retain them as long as possible.
So it’s important to invest in reactivation as a marketing strategy . You want to use a system that allows you to highlight gaps of inactivity, triggering a reactivation email sequence which should be carefully planned to bring players back. Calling them on the phone would reactivate more customers, more quickly, but not all companies have the capacity to call their inactive customers, unless they engage a third party like Enteractive to do it.
So here’s a quick guide on the key points of a reactivation email campaign:
Reactivation starts with onboarding
Effective reactivation email campaigns require careful planning. Starts from the moment your customer is on-boarded. You’ll need to make sure that you collect as much information as possible from your players and then segment them accordingly. You don’t need to send highly tailored email campaigns if this takes too much time out of your marketing day-to-day activities. However, when reactivating players that have gone quiet, you need to know how they behaved when they were engaged users. So the first step is to isolate the latent players and keep them segmented based on their preferences.
Get your players back in the game with (Re)Activation Cloud
Take it personally
Literally. If you want to activate subscribers that have become inactive, you need to send them emails that are more personal.
The first email that many companies send is the “We Miss You” email. This first attempt can be very simple. Just say ‘we miss you’ and offer them a bonus that is connected to those games or topics that they engaged with when they on-boarded as a client.
A/B test your copy
A percentage of your players will churn because they registered for a number of similar sites and then received a lot of similar emails in a short period of time. This causes them to desensitise and eventually stop opening the emails you send them. Consequently, they forget to return to your website.
A good title for your email campaign can prompt a better open rate and reactivate more players, so focusing on your titles will make all the difference. The best way to write really good titles is to ask your copywriter to come up with about five or six per email, and then choose the 2 strongest to A/B test them. Also if you don’t have time to customise all the emails you send as suggested above, you can take the shortcut and customise only the titles in the subject field.
Add engaging content
In order to catch your inactive database subscribers and get them to come to your website, they need to click on one of the links in your email. Get them to click by using engaging content.
Add big coloured buttons, use bright colourful imagery, add an animated gif and make sure the most prominent parts of your email are the bits you can click on. Give them a good reason to click. Make it easy for them to click through and start playing. Offer a bonus. Add in the ‘forgot password link’ in your email too.
Send multiple emails
Some marketers are scared of sending too many emails to a dormant database. They will send one email a month to ‘softly’ remind their churned players that they exist. This approach is the exact opposite of what you need to do.
When players stop coming to your site, engaging them slowly over time is not going to cut it.
You need to go in guns blazing, and yes, some people will unsubscribe (but isn’t that a blessing in disguise?). You want people who are excited to receive your emails. You don’t want people who are simply tolerating you.
So sending more emails will actually purge those people that were not that interested to begin with. These will probably be the ones that used that one-time bonus and never came back. When this happens, your list of dormant customers will be smaller, the ones that have no interest will unsubscribe, while some will activate.
For the ones that don’t click, little can be done, unless you want to go all-in and harvest all the latent revenue in your dormant list by outsourcing to a reactivation specialist to call those players and reactivate them on a call. That’s the next level in personalised player engagement, and since that’s what we do here at Enteractive, why don’t you give us a call – we’ll be happy to give you all the details!
Contact our Head of Business Development, Andrew Foster (andrew.foster@enteractive.se), on +356 9994 8841.
About Enteractive:
Pioneers in player (Re)Activation, Enteractive partners with operators to increase retention and player loyalty, by engaging with players in a one-to-one conversation. Gaming groups across Europe are attracted to Enteractive’s ability to re-engage with inactive players in a scalable and personal way. All (Re)Activation methods used are GDPR and G4 compliant, and all data processed is highly secured.
As the pioneers behind the (Re)Activation Cloud™, Enteractive are experts in building bridges between operators and their players, increasing retention and player loyalty by engaging with players in a 1-on-1 conversation.
Enteractive also offers 24/7 Customer Support as an easy plug-and-play extension of day-to-day business operations.
