10 email examples for inactive customers

It’s no secret that serving customers well should be the top priority for any online store that wants to increase sales and establish a good reputation in the market. However, it’s not enough just to react to customers’ requests for help, or worse, to listen to their complaints.

The secret to establishing a great reputation for Customer Experience is to make your customers feel that they are being heard and cared for (Customer Care). Part of that process is anticipating these customers’ wishes, offering personalized communication, and reaching out even when it seems like they’ve forgotten about you.

Read also: 9 proven ways to build customer loyalty in e-commerce

To help you with this process, here we explain how to demonstrate your concern for your customers with email examples for inactive customers.

Good reading!

What is an inactive customer?

As we saw earlier, the focus of Customer Care is to meet the needs and protect the greatest asset of any company: its customers.

That’s why the increase in inactive customers – customers who haven’t accessed your store for some time – should create an alert.

That’s because, as we all know, it’s much more expensive to acquire new customers than to engage existing ones. However, in addition to increasing how much customers spend, stores also need to maximize how often they shop.

A great way to achieve this is by sending messages to inactive customers, reactivating communication, and offering some advantages for the consumer to return to your e-commerce.

With emails to inactive customers, online stores can engage customers who haven’t bought anything in a long time and aren’t opening periodic newsletters either.

Now, you must be wondering: why bother to recover inactive customers? This can be explained with two simple metrics, and well-known in digital marketing for e-commerce: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) and CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)

We are going to explain this further below.

Why contact an inactive customer?

Remember we said earlier that an old customer is cheaper than a new customer. 

Well, to do this calculation, you need to calculate the Cost of Customer Acquisition – which, as the name implies, is the cost of winning over new customers – with the Customer Lifetime Value – which calculates the value of a customer’s life cycle in your commerce.

The formula for calculating CAC is:

CAC = investments in acquiring new customers ÷ acquired customers.

The formula for calculating the CLV is:

CLV = average order value × purchase frequency (expressed in orders per year) × average customer relationship with the store (expressed in years).

Since CAC depends on elements that are out of your control, like the competition, the CLV can be expanded indefinitely through relatively small actions – like making an extra sale to the same customer.

CLV is fully impacted by marketing automation, along with a good CRM for e-commerce, which will guarantee personalized communication capable of engaging old customers, turning them into loyal customers.

To ensure an increase in CLV, you need to increase the number of periodic customers. Part of that is getting in touch with inactive customers: people who have already purchased from your virtual store, but for some reason have stopped accessing the e-commerce and making purchases within the past time.

For that, you need the right communication, at the right time, one of the pillars of a good e-commerce marketing automation system.

How and when to send an email to an inactive customer?

If you have a marketing automation system integrated into your CRM, it’s very easy to set a goal to recover inactive customers. 

Just set the amount of time that the customer isn’t visiting your site or opening the newsletters and define the communication that will be used to attract them again, based on the customer intelligence data available in your database.

Marketing automation for inactive customers works like this:

1. The customer spends a certain period not visiting the website nor opening the periodic newsletters.
2. The customer receives an email with a reminder to come back to the store and see what’s new — possibly with a customized discount.
3. If the customer does not open the email and does not visit the store, the same message will be sent a second time, after some time, also determined by the store.

This ensures that your customers are not forgotten. At edrone, the Customer Recovery scenario is one of the most successful for e-commerces worldwide; with it, our customers achieved a 300% increase in loyal customers in 12 months.

Below are some email examples for inactive customers that will help increase the number of returning customers to your online store.

Email examples for inactive customers

Before showing some real examples of emails for inactive customers, let’s talk a little bit about the text for inactive customers since personalized communication is essential to recover a consumer who has distanced themselves from your virtual store.

How to write messages to recover inactive clients?

The key to writing customized messages for inactive customers is having a system in place that ensures you know your customer.

For this, it is necessary to segment your contact database and understand:

1. How long the client has been inactive;
2. Why the client is down;
3. What this customer wants to buy from your e-commerce again.

With these answers in hand, it is enough to put the marketing automation to work and establish a flow of personalized emails to the segmented databases.

Below, are some examples of messages to inactive customers based on their preferences.

Message for an Inactive Customer who likes discounts

For inactive customers who have already purchased from your e-commerce during sales or using discount coupons, you can send the following message:

Hi NAME! How are you?

We noticed that it’s been X days since you visited our store. So we decided to present you with a discount coupon!

Use this coupon: XXXXXX

*Hurry up! This coupon can expire at any time.

Message for Inactive Customers with Customized products

For a customer who likes to receive recommendations for customized products and has already been impacted by cross-selling campaigns, for example, you can send the following message:

Hello NAME, how are you?

We are missing you! And we noticed that it has been a while since you visited our store.

Look at these products that we selected mainly for you!

Message for Inactive Customer that creates a Relationship

For customers who have already shown interest in engaging with the brand, like to be helped via chat, and need to be welcomed, send a relational message and show that you miss them!

Hello NAME, how are you?

We miss you! Come visit us and discover what’s new!

Every week we have new products that can make a difference in your day 😉

Now that we’ve talked about the text for inactive customers, it’s important to point out that the SUBJECT OF THE E-MAIL is extremely important and must seek engagement, and generate curiosity, urgency, or empathy — thus guaranteeing the opening of the e-mail marketing.

Here are 10 real examples of emails to inactive customers that can ensure customer retention in your online store.

10 email examples for inactive customers

Promotion or Discount Coupon

News 

Customized Products

Social Proof

Free shipping 

Urgency

Interaction

Information

Customized Content

Gift Suggestion

In the edrone Customer Recovery scenario, you can join the CRM information of your e-commerce with personalized marketing automation and set up several emails flows segmented for different categories of inactive customers.

Therefore, you send the right message, to the right person, at the right time!