The win-back campaign that "failed" on paper

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Revenue Play - an issue where I share some real stories from my marketing email success.

This week, I want to talk about the win-back campaign that failed on paper.

A dormant account win-back campaign came in at 22% open rate and 1.2% CTR, and leadership wanted to call it early. Open rates and clicks should not dictate the success of an email.

I wanted to check one more thing before anyone touched the off switch. Turns out email was never supposed to close this deal in the first place, it just had to plant that seed that “hey, we still exist!”

This one's about what happens when you stop grading a seed by how fast it grows into a tree.

Let’s dive in.

The reason I’m pushing email this week is that I just finished the Q2 Signals report, and it’s being finalized for release shortly. And one big theme is that the cost per lead is going up. Acquisition is getting more expensive, causing marketing teams to look at their CRM for reactivation strategies.

A production and manufacturing client had a list of dormant accounts - companies that had bought before and gone quiet. We built a win-back sequence to get back in front of them. The open rate landed at 22%, click-through at 1.2%. Solid, unremarkable numbers by most standards.

Leadership was measuring this campaign against the benchmarks they used for regular engaged sends, newsletters, active nurture - you know, the usual list.

That comparison made the win-back campaign look like it was underperforming, when it was never playing the same game to begin with.

Dormant accounts do not open and click like warm ones. Judging them the same way was the actual problem, not the campaign.

If there’s a pulse, there’s a potential. We don’t build trust in a day. That takes time, and email marketing is the same way.

Instead of stopping at open and click data, we cross-referenced who received the win-back emails against what got purchased after. Any closed deal tied to a dormant account on that list got pulled and reviewed, regardless of whether that account had opened a single email in the sequence.

Pst…you can do this directly in HubSpot under the Campaigns setting.

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At first glance, win-back campaigns should be about winning back the relationship. But leadership cares about the money.

Real deals closed among accounts that had received the win-back sequence. The email itself did not do the closing. Sales conversations and meetings did that part. But those conversations only happened because the email opened the door back up.

The open rate never showed that, but the revenue did.

TL;DR

Stop scoring win-back and reactivation campaigns against your regular engagement benchmarks. They are not the same campaign type and never will be. In B2B, email is very often the thing that starts the conversation, not the thing that closes it. People change their minds in calls, in meetings, in conversations that you cannot fully track in HubSpot. Measure the revenue that follows the send, not just the send itself.

Have questions? Email me at [email protected] and let’s talk!