Email Recycling Program
Posted by George Palatine on May 26th, 2009
Does your company have an online promotion or email campaign that outperformed all the rest? Why not recycle it and see if you can recapture some of that success.
If you sell a durable hard good (products lasting several years) or a service that has a long repeat/renewal cycle (interior design or teeth whitening) you may not necessarily want to get back to those customers who purchased the first time with the same message. In this case, redeploy your campaign focusing on subscribers “post promo”. In other words, lets say you ran a special offer that did great in the fall of 2008. Dust off that campaign and email it to the segment of your list that was not exposed previously. (People who opted-in AFTER the original deployment date or did not open/click the original message).
For the people who did purchase during the last campaign now might be a good time for a re-touch program. You can promote add-on or complementary offerings to the product or service they originally purchased. Items like an extended warranty, touch-up service (as in the case of teeth whitening) or an additional accessory are a few possibilities.
Now if you sell a product or service that has a short re-purchase cycle (consumer products, restaurant, car wash, etc.) then resending this previous campaign to your entire list makes sense. Odds are they may be interested again. Be sure and test to see which group performed better, the people who now saw this offer 2X or the ones seeing it for the first time.
The biggest thing to understand in recycling past programs, is determining why did this program outperform the others? Was it simply a great offer/value, were outside factors like timing involved (a snow blower sale in the middle of an unexpected blizzard), was a unique list segmentation criteria used or was it just luck? If you identify what factors caused this program to perform so well, you can repeat these steps again and optimize your future efforts to improve your overall results.
