Inspired Re-Engagement Campaigns To Reignite Lost Investors
“Not all those who wander are lost!” These wise words of J.R.R. Tolkien certainly feel attributable to the paths trodden by the digital investor. They’re online surfing through funds to determine those that align with their goals, yet even if they’ve stalled on their buyer journey, they’re not completely out of range for savvy fund marketers.
Interests change over time. Investment pain points soften or become more pronounced due to current events. What was once targeted brand messaging may still ring bells with certain demographics, and not others. There are many reasons for even trusted investors to disappear for a while, but this should never dissuade marketers from reemphasising their value, repurposing content and ‘nudging’ cold contacts toward renewed conversion potential.
Re-engagement campaigns are just as pivotal as winning new business, and they are often more personalised to investors by using whatever digital ‘fingerprints’ they’ve left you. Here’s why they deserve your time and attention, with inspirations from the B2B and B2C fields to help you don the caps of the dogged and successful salesperson.
The Reasonings for Re-Engagement
Bringing back chilled contacts is not all about reaching the final sale. It’s a vital part of a fund marketer’s awareness, compliance, and demand generation tactics:
Keeping your fund relevant: even one reminder email is enough to elevate a fund offering to the top of an investor’s inbox, and their minds.
Increasing marketing attribution: changing inactive users to leads through content offers, discounts, and event form sign-ups can lead to more conversions. It’s always cheaper and simpler to win them over than acquire new potential prospects from scratch.
Understanding investors better: judging by re-engagements that are successful or otherwise, you can narrow down preferences that may appeal to your wider subscriber lists.
Protecting Your IP Reputation: service providers do not take kindly to inactive lists, marking content as irrelevant or even Spam, which can affect deliverability to all users––engaged ones included!
Regaining buy-in: with requalifying efforts showcasing transparency to gain end user’s data consent, regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM are adhered to.
Examples from the Marketing Wild West
All fund marketers should keep an eagle eye on email campaigns they’ve signed up to themselves. If you’re on the list for an apparel brand or newsletter subscription, it’s well worth noting down their effective ways at drawing you back into the fold with call-to-actions, messaging and timing.
As many of these examples display, it’s often about getting into the mindset of an investor’s wants (by analysing their past interaction data), hitting emotions that feed into their own buyer narrative, and using questions to motivate action:
The Urgent Email
It’s best to think like a B2C seller here––a sale is ending soon, and investors should apply now to stay in the loop.
Adidas is particularly good for this: offering clearly specified dates to show when they’ll miss their chance, as well as multiple links to different clothing categories. This creates options of interest rather than pigeon-holing subscribers into performing one action. They’ll feel they are ‘browsing’ while leaving digital traces of engagement the marketer can pick up on later.
Funds could do similar emails with offers to download various high-value reports.
The Abandoned Basket
All e-commerce sites are great at this: nudging a buyer that they’ve left an item in the checkout and tempting them to return. A cooled contact might not be completely turned away from your content, just merely forgotten about it in their busy lives.
While there are no shopping carts involved, this method can be turned into a positive spin on a fund’s progress beyond their last interaction. If you highlight fund performance, case studies, or content releases ‘Since We Last Heard From You…[this milestone happened]’ it can show you’re not a brand worth forgetting.
Gamified Incentives
Many budding linguists will be aware of Duolingo’s mascots’ extremely regular push notifications reminding them to take a lesson to boost their streak. It’s a little over the top, but does tap into the idea that they’re on a roll and should continue with you.
This same principle can be tied to a fund’s online platform or investor portal, with a reminder email about fund performance graphs, and commentary targeted to investors’ financial goals giving them reasons to re-check on their investments (and hopefully explore more options). Polls and surveys can make investors feel they’re contributing to a better service for them in future, too.
Make Communications Exclusive
Anything with a subject line reading ‘Exclusive offer’ is bound to turn heads and lead to clicks, so long as it’s backed up with content. Music brands such as Spotify advertise early access to upcoming gigs, and funds could either grant investors a ‘first look’ into a research report, or get reserved places at an online or in-person portfolio manager Q&A session.
Emphasising What Your Brand Stands For
Re-engagements are getting extremely creative, particularly when they can catch attention through playful graphics and send users to a landing page or sign-up form for further nurture attempts. Fashion brands like Missguided have used lighthearted scroll-downs, emojis and day-to-day language (“FOMO”) to appeal to what their customers have missed through cooled interactions.
It’s a quick way to show off brand voice and differentiate a remain from drier communications, and you never know who you could win back with some humour. Even a ‘Welcome Back’ email with a personal message from a manager following a re-engagement is ample to showcase personality.
Hinging on Occasions
Popular cafe brands may tempt engagements with birthday offers, like a slice of cake. This is informal, but with finances so intrinsically linked to what’s going on in the world, the same ‘right place, right time’ idea applies when promoting an expert’s voice to speak about the fund’s benefits during moments of prosperity or difficulty, such as with a “[TOPIC]: Thoughts From Our CEO” subject.
Offer More Access of Unsubscribes
It’s helpful to use two clearly signposted CTAs. An investor may be reengaged and sign up for more updates––great! On the other hand, they could unsubscribe. It’s not the ideal outcome, but unsubscribes still help the marketer identify a ‘sunset’ user to take off lists for great email deliverability practice, without any cumbersome investigative work.
Four Rules For Re-Engaging
With these ideas fuelling different ways to make re-engagement campaigns sing, there are a few cornerstone habits every fund marketer should follow:
Discover who’s inactive: marketers could define inactivity thresholds themselves, such as no email opens, or no clicks on fund pages or other content interactions in 90 or 180 days. Sales cycles are long, so this period could cover a window up to 12 months. Segment these cooled users from regular campaigns and into re-engagement steps.
Offer value: always use the right tone when trying to win people back. Exclusive perks are great, but asking if investors are still interested in what your fund is up to or showcasing how you’ve made improvements to a product or service will show how you continue to benefit them beyond a one-time offer.
Stagger your remails: there’s no one-and-done way to re-engage! Sequences of three or four emails should be used over a week or two to highlight content they’ve missed, showcase studies they may be interested in, and even a ‘last chance saloon’ closer that you respect their wishes to step away (“we’ll stop sending emails unless we hear from you”, for instance).
Check your analytics: re-engagements may do wonders for identifying similar prospects that may start interacting again with targeted content, and well-crafted CTA or subject line messaging. Completely ice-cold contacts can simply be removed to maintain data privacy commitments.
With multiple avenues to spark renewed interest from any prospect, there’s every chance that balancing your fund’s benefits and brand philosophy with creative customer-centric psychology can make inactive investors re-tune into what you do. Keep your own marketing eyes peeled on inspired re-engagement campaigns you receive, and redress them as you see fit, with your repository of excellent upcoming and past content evergreen for exactly when you may need it.
ProFundCom can fund marketers reengage their inactive subscription bases with tools and strategies tailored to the financial industry:
Thought Leadership Promotion: Leverage ProFundCom to promote thought leadership content, whitepapers, research reports, and industry insights to showcase expertise and credibility within the financial sector.
Email Marketing Campaigns: With ProFundCom’s email marketing platform, create targeted campaigns that promote brand messaging, thought leadership content, and industry insights to a segmented audience, increasing brand visibility and recognition.
Lead Scoring and Qualification: Prioritise leads based on engagement levels and interactions through scoring and focus efforts on high-potential prospects.
Unified Data Management: Fund marketers can consolidate customer data, engagement metrics, and campaign performance from various sources to gain a comprehensive view of their audience and marketing activities in one platform.
Personalised Content Recommendations: Using data analytics and user behaviour tracking, ProFundCom can recommend tailored content to website visitors and leads based on their interests and engagement history.
Data Analytics and Reporting: Track the performance of lead generation campaigns, measure conversion rates, and analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies to monitor key metrics and optimise lead generation efforts for reliable results.
