7 Re-Engagement Email Examples to Get Repeat Purchases

Re-engagement emails.

They are the best way to convert customers who, for some reason, haven’t visited your store in a while or left without finishing the purchase. Why they’re the best? You know what they say: customer retention costs five times less expensive than customer acquisition.

So—

Re-engagement emails are a simple and cheap way to retain customers and bring them back to your store. If you’re looking for re-engagement email examples, here are seven must-have ones.

What is a re-engagement email?

A re-engagement email is an email message designed to re-activate subscribers who stopped engaging with your email campaigns. People can stop opening emails for many reasons—an overfilled inbox, irrelevant email content, too many emails from you, etc.

Here’s a re-engagement email example from Proozy, an online retailer.

Re-engagement email examples

Now, let’s see how real businesses are convincing their customers to get back with re-engagement emails.

1. The abandoned cart email

The abandoned cart email is one of the most effective re-engagement emails you can send to past customers. The average revenue per abandoned cart email is estimated to be around $5. That’s compared to $0.02 per promotional email and $0.07 per birthday milestone email.

Here’s an example of this re-engagement email from Bison Coolers.

A few practices to follow when building this re-engagement email:

• Be Specific – Make sure it’s clear to your customers which products you’re reminding them about. Mention the items they left in their cart in your copy, add relevant imagery, and including mention of the product in the subject and CTA text.

• Be Authentic – This is your opportunity to be a little playful with your copy. Make sure that your brand voice and style shines through in your email. Help your customers remember why they love your brand, and what they are missing out on.

• Be Generous – If you want to drive customers back to the shopping cart, offer a special time-bound promo code or discount to create a sense of urgency. Give them an incentive they can’t ignore.

Related: Bison Coolers is a business with an estimated $12 million of revenue. Check out their story: Best Shopify Stores

2. The psychology-based email

To persuade customers to return to the shopping cart, you need to present them with strategic, conversion-driven messaging. That’s where the psychology-based re-engagement email comes into play. These are emails that include or utilize specific psychological techniques to drive action.

To implement this re-engagement email strategy for your store, send messages that leverage the following:

• Social Proof: Statements, testimonials, reviews, photos, and other content about your products from happy customers that will influence people to shop with you again.

• FOMO: Statements that make customers think that they’ll be missing out if they don’t grab your products while they still can. Examples include limited-time offers, messaging about limited quantities, testimonials from others who are enjoying their products.

• Scarcity and Urgency: Statements and imagery that lets customers know inventory is limited and time is running out. The goal is to drive them back to your store to purchase before it’s too late. These statements usually reference time (offer ends soon!) or quantity (almost sold out!).

• Risk Aversion: Statements and imagery that remind customers their is no risk involved in their purchase (examples: free shipping, free returns, money back guarantee, try-before-you-buy, etc.).

Here’s an example of this re-engagement email from Kate Spade.

3. The related product email

Another great way to drive customers to buy from you again is to send re-engagement emails featuring products you know they’ll love. Customers expect that the brands they support to know what they actually want.

This simple email technique works like this:

• A shopper comes to your store, views your products, adds some to their cart, and completes their purchase.

• The software and email tools you use track this purchase, then match it with related products you have in your inventory.

• You either manually or automatically (based on time or triggers) send an email campaign out to customers featuring these related or “recommended” products, along with compelling CTAs and offers that persuade them to shop with you again.

Here’s an example of a re-engagement email from Redbubble. The company shares recommendations based on the specific product a customer bought.

4. The educational email

The important thing to remember when you’re communicating with your email list is that you can’t just spend all your time sending them campaigns trying to get them to buy.

One way to continue nurturing your relationship with your customers without sending promotional emails is by launching an educational drip series. Beardbrand, for example, creates original blog and video content featuring grooming and style tips.

By doing this, Beardbrand is able to establish itself as a useful resource to subscribers. Trust leads to loyalty, loyalty leads to sales. Here’s the example of one of those brilliant re-engagement emails.

If you want to launch an educational re-engagement emails for your products or brand, consider the following questions:

• Who are your customers?

• What do they care about?

• How do they spend their time?

• Why do they care about your products?

• How do your products make their lives easier or better?

• What niche topic can you focus on in your educational series?

Your answers will help you shape and build a successful and nurture-driven education email series.

5. The order confirmation upsell email

One of the biggest and most commonly missed opportunities in e-commerce email marketing relates to order confirmation and receipt emails. Although these emails are typically some of the most successful emails for brands in terms of open rates, they are surprisingly underutilized.

To drive customers to buy from you again, consider turning these transactional emails into sales tools by including recommended products.

If you want to test this tactic out before investing in it, try adding a few lines of text and a CTA link to your order confirmation email template. In order to measure the success of your test, make sure you can track the click-throughs on the link.

Here’s a good example of this re-engagement email type from One Dollar Shave Club.

6. The product replenishment email

If you sell products that have specific expiration dates (like food) or if you can predict when customers will typically run out, you should be sending re-engagement emails that remind them to restock.

It’s an easy way to get back on the radar and reconnect with your customers before they go searching for a similar product from a competitor. You can use most email marketing clients to set automated trigger-based emails like these that follow the lifecycle of your customer. To dive deeper into this tactic, read this great blog post from Jimmy Daly at Vero.

Here’s an example of this re-engagement email.

7. The promo email

The final email you should be sending to customers is the classic promotional email. It’s likely that at a minimum you’re already sending these to customers.

But if not—try sending emails to customers that celebrate and promote the following:

• Personal milestones: Send promo codes or offers to customers on their birthday, on their anniversary of becoming your customer, or on a date that relates to your business (like the anniversary of your grand opening).

• Holidays: Send special deals and themed-emails that relate to specific holidays throughout the year (like New Year’s, the 4th of July, Christmas, etc.).

• New products: Send emails whenever you are launching or have recently launched new products that you want your customers to know about.

These re-engagement emails can be fairly effective, but a word of caution: please don’t overdo it. These days, it seems like everyday is a holiday (National Cookie Day, National Chocolate Day, etc.)—it’s better not to bombard customers with too many holiday-themed re-engagement emails.

Re-engagement emails: over to you

What other emails are you sending to get customers to buy again? Tell me in the comments below.