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Today we're talking about cold customers, people who have bought before, but then they've just gone dark for months. How do we win them back? In today's episode, we're going to discuss something called a win back campaign, which is a tool you can use a couple times a year to try to coax those non buyers back into the fold. How do they work? Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product, you've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 344 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident and in your marketing and sales strategies so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the show. Big shout out to all of my regulars. I really appreciate you and if you're new to the podcast and you're checking me out for the first time, so glad you're here today. I hope you find this valuable. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast and check out my first 10 episodes. I designed them to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. So if you feel like you're a little green and you're not understanding some of the concepts we're throwing around in today's episode, go back and listen to those. It's a really good foundation. Another place you can go is to subscribe to my email newsletter because when you do, I'm going to send you an email about every four or five days for several months. And I designed those emails to go in a certain order and to build on each other. And they really do introduce you to the framework of marketing. I introduce you to the key key podcast episodes to listen to. I give away free stuff. It's really good. So you can subscribe by going to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe, and that is totally free. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. A new year is the perfect time to streamline your sales and grow more profitably. So if you run a CSA or you sell wholesale or manage both, Localline helps you streamline your sales and scale with confidence. In 2025, farms and food hubs that used Localline grew their sales by 33%, building on the 23% growth they saw the year before. Average order values increased by 31%. I know mine did. And total order count grew by 9%. Look, real results across operations of all sizes. Localline brings everything together in one platform. They have CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, barcode scanning, a box builder, and pos so that you spend less time managing admin and more time growing your business. And switching couldn't be easier. There are no setup fees, my friends, no sales commissions. And their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free, taking the workload off your plate. And that usually only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use the code MDF2026 at checkout. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and and then enter that code MDF2026start 2026. Organized, efficient, and ready to grow with Localline. And now back to the show. Well, if you could see me right now, you'd be laughing. I am in my church's parking lot in my car at 6 o' clock at night. It's dark. I'm under a giant light in the parking lot so that I can see. See my notes. My son's at youth group tonight at church and he's really nervous about it. It's his second time going. We're trying to get him involved in that. And so I'm really excited that he said yes. And he. He's in there right now. So I have two hours to tool around. And first I was gonna go shopping, but then I decided, no, I'm going to do this podcast and take care of that. I had a lot of energy for it. I have a really good topic today that I'm excited about. So picture me right now in my Honda Accord in the front seat, holding my microphone up to my face. And my. My laptop's over in the passenger seat. I'm staring at the waveform audio right now as I'm talking, and anybody who walks by me right now in the parking lot is probably like, who is that lady and what is she doing? But it's dark and there's no one here, so hopefully, hopefully it's all good today. I Want to talk to you about win back campaigns. And this topic came up for me actually. I was inspired by my dog Daisy. I was walking her a few days ago and it was just this perfect metaphor. It was this perfect story that illustrates exactly why we need win back campaign. So I'm going to start out by telling that story. I was taking Daisy for a walk around our farm and she's not on my leash when I do that. I just let her run. She usually comes back and checks in with me and then goes back out and runs through the fields and we do this big figure eight around my farm. Takes me about 40 minutes to walk it. Well, normally she stays right alongside me but I noticed that she wasn't with me and I turned around and I saw her way off in the distance and she was still over in this old field corn section on my in laws land, actually right next to ours. And she was digging away furiously at something and I thought to myself, well, she'll eventually get bored and come and find me again. So I just kept walking away from her in the opposite direction on my little path that I always take. But she never came back to check in with me. And so I, you know, I just kept looking back from time to time to make sure she was there, not off gallivanting with some pedestrians on her bike path. And I knew that I was eventually going to come back around by her with my figure eight. So I just, you know, I waited. So sure enough, I eventually come back around her. She is, she is a mess. She has made a mess in the field. She has dug several holes looking for a vole I think, or a bunny rabbit, I'm not sure. But she is muddy as heck because it had rained recently and the field is a wreck. But she still hasn't found whatever she's looking for. So I called to her and I have a treat in my pocket so she normally should come, but she was having none of it and I finally had to go and physically like pull her collar and, and have her look at me and basically drag her over into my presence and pull her along away from the vole nest for several yards before she stayed with me and followed me and kept walking back home. I don't know if you have a pet like this. For the most part she's pretty obedient. But when she's found something she gets focused on that and there is no distracting her. And the only thing that worked for me in that case was I had to get close. I had to offer something compelling and in some cases, I had to force her. It was really about interrupting her pattern. Right. And helping her see something else that she could get excited about. Well, here's the metaphor. Are you ready? Customers do the same thing. I was thinking about that as I was walking her back to the house. Isn't this like how we have some of our customers that have been with us, they've bought things from us, and then all of a sudden they go dark, they just disappear and we don't see them buying anything. They have no behavior, there's no engagement. But the thing is, what I want to argue today is that in many cases, not all cases, but in many cases, they aren't gone. They haven't decided that they don't like you anymore. They're just distracted. And so we as a business need to have a strategy in place for how to win back those people into our business. And that's why we have this phrase, the win back campaign. And many businesses, not just in our industry, have these things. They have a mechanism called a win back campaign that they enact from time to time to try to lure back their customers that have gone cold. And this isn't about yelling louder, trying to make a lot of noise. It's just about reconnecting and inspiring them and coaxing them back over, rewarding their return when they do reestablishing a behavior of buying with us again. Right. We have to get their attention, give them something they want, remind them why we're so great. Sometimes it's like an incentive or special offer that will change their current behavior pattern of being disconnected to reconnected, rebuying, being reminded why they like our brand so much, and then getting them back into that habit of purchasing and engaging with our brand. Okay, so win back campaigns, that's what these are called. And I thought this was a good time to talk about it. In the season. Because if you are in North America like I am in the winter season, in the month of January, it's kind of a lull for us vegetable farmers, especially in the north or in the Midwest. And this is kind of the time when I typically look at who are my customers that have gone cold and do I want to try and win back some of them? Do I want to try and check in with them and see, hey, do you still even want to be on my list? Have you moved away, like, what's going on? And I have a particular mechanism in place that I trigger usually twice a year to try and pull these cold subscribers and cold customers back into the fold. So I want to teach you what what a win back campaign is. How do you define a cold customer and why do customers go cold? Sort of a little bit of a mindset reframe for us why it's worth going after them and then how we actually get them to come back. How do we deliver a win back offer? What kind of offers do well? How do we communicate that offer and how do we actually make it happen? What's the Step by Step now just so you know, this is going to be an overview training but I have a more detailed step by step project inside of Farm Marketing School. Starting early February it will be inside of there. So if you're a member of Farm Marketing School, just know that that is a project you can go take. Watch the lesson. And then there's a project planner. There's templates to make it really fast and easy step by step so you know exactly how to build it and put it into position in your farm business. So just look for that one starting February 1st inside of our Marketing School. If you want more information about FMS and how to join my community, go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS let's talk about some of the reasons why a customer might go cold on you and you really should not take this personally. There's kind of four different categories. Number one, it could just be like life reasons, things like busy season at work or they have health issues. I'm raising my hand here. I know that happened to me. Family changes or maybe someone's going through a divorce or there's a financial tightening of the belt and even just travel or schedule shifts in their work and they're not able to partake of your product as much. It just isn't worth it for them right now in this season. So that's kind of category one that has nothing to do with you. They probably still love your product. Category two might be timing or seasonality mismatches. So they like you but just not right now for some reason. Or maybe the CSA didn't fit that year. I have a handful of customers every year that tell me this in advance. Like hey, it's just no person. Don't take this personally, but I'm traveling a ton. It doesn't make sense for me. Maybe their freezer is still full and they just aren't interested yet. Right? They bought in bulk. It hasn't run out yet. Category C is just an attention drift. Maybe their inbox is overloaded or the algorithm changes and they're not seeing your Emails. So they still like you, but they just have stopped seeing you. Your brand isn't getting in front of their eyes anymore and you have slipped out of their weekly rhythm and you just need to somehow get in front of them again and remind them how amazing you are. And then of course, there's the offer misalignment. So this is where they still like you, but they just don't like this particular product or offer that you seem to be all about right now. Or maybe chicken buyers don't want beef or a la carte buyers just don't want to be in your csa, Right? They want something different now. So there's all kinds of reasons why a person might have stopped engaging with you. Now, of course, there is the possibility that they don't want to be your customer anymore. They've just decided, for whatever reason, they don't really like your brand. But you know what? I really think that's a small percentage of the case. Usually it's one of the other four categories. So let's not immediately leap to this scarcity mindset of like, oh, I'm terrible, nobody likes me, I'm not worth it, I don't want to ask. How embarrassing, right? No, it could be something else. So silence doesn't mean they're dissatisfied. Silence just maybe means that there's not the right trigger. Right. Not the right offer. So what we need to do next is figure out how to get them back. All right? And what the win back campaigns usually are about is, number one, creating a win back offer. Now, you've heard me talk a lot about offers on the podcast before, right? Offers are just you figuring out what somebody wants and then building a package around it, or building your product or talking about your product in such a way that it's speaking to a person's pain point or problem and it gets them to that point where they're like, I want that thing and you're pricing it the right way and the value that you deliver is right. It's just this beautiful transaction. Okay? There's all kinds of different offers. There's gateway offers, there's upsell offers, there's cross sell offers, there's signature offers, there's bundled offers, you name it. And offers happen at certain times. Like the offer for your signature offer might be timed at a certain time of the year for a particular audience based on a particular motivation. And that offer isn't going to work for somebody in a completely different place in the sales funnel. Right? So we have to learn how to create offers for different occasions and different seasons in a customer's journey through our sales funnel. A win back offer is a special offer for a special type of customer who has been gone for a long time. So we build it a certain way just for them. Okay, so this is a targeted special offer designed only for inactive buyers. This is not meant to be for everyone on your list. It's meant to restart behavior. It is not about maximizing your margin. I'm going to say that again. You may actually take a hit in terms of your profit margin, but this is meant to restart buying behavior, not maximize your margin. The reason why this is important to remember is that we make our money big picture on the customer's lifetime value, the total amount of money they spend in their lifetime with us. So sometimes that means it's okay to take a little bit of hit on a profit margin and in order to get them back into our buying circle so they get back into that behavior of buying more frequently and getting back to that customer lifetime value. So a win back offer is not a discount that's blasted out to everyone. It is not a desperate sale. It is not a long email explaining everything in the world. It's usually pretty short. The core characteristics of a strong win back offer are going to be low friction. So it's an easy yes. When the customer reads it, they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, I totally want that. There's a clear deadline. So it's not an open ended offer. You say you've got seven days or 48 hours or two weeks, whatever you want. It's very specific and it feels personal and intentional. Like you've noticed that they haven't been around and you kind of miss them, right? There's just this, this emotional tug. It feels personal and it's an intentional push. So I want you to think back to my little story about Daisy, my dog. I didn't wave the treat way back from my house, right? I had to walk back into her field of vision and meet her where she was. And actually, frankly, I had to pull her collar a little bit and say look at me and get her eyes on me again before she was willing to listen and see my offer for her. And it's a little bit like that. We have to actually do a little bit of legwork. Get intentional, get personal, go into their space, go find them, go after them, meet them where they are and give them something, dangle something in front of them that they want. Now what are some win back offer examples that farms have used? So I'm just going to give you a few. If you are a CSA farm, your win back offer might be something like one week trial box for free or a comeback week. Like you could actually have an entire campaign week internally called the comeback week and you spend that whole week building a promotion going after people that have lapsed and you can call it the comeback week for them. Okay. A $20 credit toward add ons or a bonus item pickup when they sign up again. That might be some examples of what your win back offer could be. For a meat producer. Maybe it's a free pack of some kind of cut of meat with X amount of money that you've spent on your order. It could be a curated back in stock bundle and you have a limited reactivation window where you offer this. Okay. If you do some kind of online farm store, it could be credit instead of a discount. So store credit, it could be a free pickup bonus when they buy their next xyz. You could even tell them what to buy. Like it has to be this item or you could give them freedom of rain or you could say within this category. It could be a loyalty restart incentive, however you want to word it. Okay, so what I want you to do if you're going to take this seriously is come up with a win back offer that is right for you, that fits your farm and that is irresistible for this kind of a client. And maybe you, maybe you don't get it right the first time. You'll study the metrics. I'll walk you through the rest of this process here. But one of the things you'll do at the end is see, well, did it work? How many people actually came back. You'll be able to tell if it's a strong win back offer if you see a good portion of people returning. And you can always test another kind of offer against against the previous one. And a b test it and the one that does better is the winning offer. And just keep doing that until you find one that you feel really solid about. Now remember, this is meant to restart behavior. It is not about maximizing your margin. So come from a space that your customers do like you and that you're speaking to that subset of folks in there who dropped off for a very good reason, not because they suddenly decided they didn't like you anymore. Okay. All right, farmers, let me ask you something. As we step into a brand new year, do you actually feel ready for the marketing side of your farm business or are you quietly hoping you'll figure it out as you go like Last season. How'd that work out for you? If marketing your farm feels like a constant scramble, something you know matters but never quite gets the time or clarity it deserves, you are not alone. I hear this from farmers and every single week. And that's exactly why I created Farm Marketing School to help you. Farm Marketing School is my monthly membership designed to help farmers build a simple, repeatable marketing system that actually fits into your real farm life. Inside, you will find bite sized, step by step, do it yourself. Marketing projects that take the overwhelm out of things like writing sales emails or how to plan your promotions, how to build your social media strategy, how to update the homepage of your website, how to write an email nurture sequence, or setting up systems that work on autopilot even when you're busy in the field, Each month you choose what to focus on. And I walk you through exactly how to do it with my on demand video trainings and my bonus resources. And you're not alone doing this. Each month we meet live on Zoom where you can ask questions, get group coaching, and hear what's working for other farmers. It's like having a farm marketing mentor and a room full of peers in your corner. This is not a massive, overwhelming course. The projects are designed to be completed in under 30 days so that you're making real progress without marketing taking over your life. So if this is the year you want to stop winging it and finally feel confident in a marketing system that brings in steady sales, I'd love to welcome you into Farm Marketing School. Join today at mydigitalfarmer.com FMS that's mydigitalfarmer.com FMs and now back to the show. All right, next we need to send the offer out. We have to communicate it. So to do that, we're going to need to be able to identify who these cold customers are. So that is the next step. You'll need to define cold for your farm business. And this is going to be different for every single farm. My definition of a cold customer will be different than yours. You might be willing to let someone sit on that list for a really long time without buying a lot longer than I would. And that's fine. You just need to make a decision about what cold customer means for you. So maybe if you're an online store or meet CSA, cold customer means no purchase in 180 days. Or maybe it's longer if you're a CSA or subscription. Maybe it's they skipped their renewal and that counts as a cold customer. Or nothing's been purchased in the last six months or no add ons have been purchased in a season or no engagement whatsoever post csa what does it look like for you? Email engagement is another kind of optional layer. If there have been no opens in 90 days or no clicks whatsoever in 120 days, is it safe to say this person is a cold customer? So there's no universal number here. The power is in choosing a rule for you, deciding what that benchmark is and then acting on it. Okay, so once you've decided what that is, you're going to go into your email service provider and you are going to create a tag called cold customer or cold buyer. Now I'm going to just interject here real quick. I'm often asked by farmers which email service provider I personally use. I use Kit formerly known as Convertkit and I love it. I personally think it's important to have a strong, robust email service provider as one of your tools. It's the primary money making generator for my business and so I'm willing to invest some money in it. If you are a brand new farm and your cash flow is really tight, I get it and I think you can get away with a free email provider for the first couple of years. But there is going to be a point in your business where I think you need to invest and actually spend some money on a good email service provider, one that's robust, that can do automations for you, that isn't clunky. Sometimes the reason why your business isn't scaling is because you're not using the right tools. The tool is actually becoming a, like a ceiling, a glass ceiling for you. I see that in a lot of cases for some of my farmers that come into farm marketing school and I have to have that hard talk with them like hey, it's time for you to grow up and like actually invest in this online e commerce platform or in a new email provider and it'll pay for itself like in like weeks if you just can build the whole marketing system around it. So I want to just challenge you, some of you are resisting and say, oh, I don't want this sounds complicated. I don't have the ability to, to make tags or to make automations and sequences and all this stuff. Well then maybe it's time to look into investing in the next level, upgrading to the next level in your system so that you can do that and just test it for a few months and see if some of this stuff begins to pay off. So I, I love having the Ability to do fancy pants sequences and rules and automations and I teach farmers in farm marketing school how to be able to do that. And once you get confident with that and you start stitching it all together, it really does some cool stuff for you. And you're not manually, you know, entering information or answering emails anymore or managing customers because you've, you've got all the different pieces talking to each other and automation's working for you. This is only possible when you are ready to commit to the kind of tool that you need that's going to do it for you. So just that goes for e commerce platforms. That's why I love local line so much. It goes for my email service provider. So if you want to check out kit, I am an affiliate for that you can go to mydigitalfarmer.com kit and I get a small commission, thank you very much if you decide to check that out. Okay, so once we have identified who are cold clients are, then we have to actually go into our email service provider, whichever one it is, and create a tag called cold buyer. You could also label it inactive 90 or former CSA or CSA non renewed or no purchase since X. And once you've created that tag, you'll have to add the tag to those clients. That may mean you have to download the CSV file of those clients and then as you do so, you'll assign the tag to them. Right. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is you have to trigger the win back campaign. So this is where you send a manual broadcast to the people who have that tag. You're only sending it to the people with that tag. I want to be clear about that. It's not your whole list. And I have an example inside of farm marketing school of what that manual broadcast could say. You could literally go and just copy it from the template and make it your own. Or you could throw it into ChatGPT and ask it to use your voice and make it sound like it comes from you. Okay, using your product. Another option to trigger the campaign after the manual broadcast. You can wait like a few months and then you can create a three part automated email sequence that goes to people with that tag. And it would be three different emails stitched back to back over the course of, you know, 10 days. Those three emails get sent out to anyone who still has that tag to keep kind of pushing the button and coaxing them to take action. And if they haven't taken action after that automated sequence goes through, then you can once Again, make a decision, do I want to keep these people on the list or not? So I'll drop that very same three part email sequence into the project resources inside of our marketing school as well so that you don't have to think about what do I say in those. It's, it's kind of a standard formula. It's really good. Okay. So you trigger the campaign whether it's just that manual broadcast or you decide to do a more fancy like three part automated sequence. Now I'm going to be honest, I have both. I use the three part automated sequence more for cleaning up my email list. Like just to say, hey, do you still want to be on my list? But I use the manual one time broadcast a couple of different times in the season to just send to the cold audience. So I use both. But you could just pick one. You don't have to do the three part series if you don't want to. You could send this through email, but you could also send it through SMS which can be really powerful if permission exists from the customer to do so. It even works to do it with an in person card. Like if you have their physical mailing address, you could mail them something. I've had that happen before with different brands where they're reaching out to me through the mail. Okay, now I want to read you a sample win back email just to get you an idea. And this is for like a meat or chicken producer. You might have a subject line like it's been a while, want a little thank you from us? That could be your subject line. A curiosity building email subject line. And then here's what the body might say. Okay. Just notice the different elements and the tone of this email. Hey, first name. It's been a little while since we've seen your name pop up on an order and I just wanted to reach out personally. I know life gets full, freezers get stocked, seasons change. So if your attention has been elsewhere lately, no big deal. But if you have been missing farm raised chicken or if you've been needing to order and you just haven't gotten around to it, I wanted to make it easy and fun to come back. Here's what we're offering. For the next seven days notice, there's a deadline. You can get a free pack of chicken drumsticks with any online order of $75 or more. No subscription, no long term commitment. Just a simple thank you for being a part of our farm community. Use code welcome back in order by XYZ date okay, so there's A deadline. If now isn't the right time, that's okay too. And if chicken isn't really your thing anymore, but you still enjoy hearing from us, you don't need to do anything. We'll still be here. But if this feels like a good nudge, we'd love to pack an order for you again warmly. And then your name and your farm name, then. P.S. if you're not interested in this offer, but you still want to stay on our email list, you can click here, keep me on the list, and that helps us know that you're still around, even if you're just browsing for now. Okay, so I want you to notice that there was a structure in that email. The subject line was warm. It was curiosity building. There was a tone in this email that felt very personal. And hey, I've noticed that you're gone. Like you missed them. You acknowledge the distance without making them feel guilty. There was a simple offer, there was a clear deadline, there was clear, easy action, and then there was a soft exit option in the P.S. did you notice that there's a way for them to let you know that they're no longer interested in hearing from you? If they are in that category of like, look, I just don't want to be on your list anymore? You give them that out. That is something called a link trigger. And this is one of those examples of a cool feature that the more robust email service providers have. So Kit has the ability to set up a link trigger where if I can set up a rule and say, if somebody clicks this link and I assign it this particular link trigger, it's going to make Kit.com do certain actions on that subscriber. It can be things like take off this tag or add this tag or add them to a sequence if they click that link. So in that case, if they say, I don't want to be on your list anymore and they click that link, I don't have to do anything, it automatically will remove the tag from them and then they won't be bothered anymore by your emails. Okay, so that's a pretty cool feature. Again, another reason why it pays to invest in an email provider that allows you to do things like that. Okay, so what happens after they take the bait? All right, let's assume that they read this comeback offer and they're like, yeah, I totally want to do this. And this is where I think a lot of farmers sometimes miss the boat. Not just farmers, but businesses in general that try to do this. So after they redeem the offer you want to over deliver on that experience. There needs to be some kind of trigger or a little yellow flag that goes off in your workflow so that you know, oh, this is a person that's been quiet for a long time and they're coming back. So I want to make sure that when I fulfill on this order, I do something a little bit extra to welcome them back into the fold. So this might be including a personal note on their invoice or slip or a little card saying, I'm so glad to see you again. Or maybe it's a clear next step. Here's the obvious next thing that I think you would like. Or maybe it's a special tip that you share with them to help them use the thing that they've just purchased. Or it's a, an encouraging word. Maybe you see them in person and you pass the order off to them and you just say something to them. You notice that they've come back. All right. But giving a clear next step for the next thing to buy is often something that I see great brands doing. It's kind of part of this. They call it like the love bombing sequence. After a person's been gone for a while, they get a series of emails that welcomes them back that thanks them, that, that loves on them and that gives them the next offer. Like another second offer after that first one, after the win back campaign. Because what we wanna do is we wanna create a new behavior, a new ritual of buying with you. So you need to put the stones in the creek for them and show them, here's the next thing that you should purchase. So maybe you have a second offer that's also a really good offer that encourages them to buy a second time and re establish that ritual. Okay, let's talk about what happens if they don't take the comeback offer. Because this is where a lot of farmers, I think, start to spiral a little bit. So first I want to normalize this. Not everyone is going to come back and that's okay. All right. A win back campaign, it's not a magic wand. It's. It's an invitation. And some people are going to take it, some people won't. There's lots of different reasons why we walked through those at the beginning of the episode. And how you respond to that tells you a lot about the health of your marketing. So here's some of the best practices. If someone doesn't take the offer. And I kind of jotted down some notes here. First, don't immediately repeat it. This is not the time to send another email the next day saying, just checking in again, that starts to feel pushy and that is what we are trying to avoid. Okay. Second, let some time pass. Sometimes the offer was really good and the timing just wasn't. I'm raising my hand here. I've had that happen to me a lot. Remember we said earlier that silence often means that there just wasn't a trigger and that trigger might show up later. So just let some time pass. Third, you can do one final check in later. This could be a few weeks or even months down the road. It could be something as simple and low stakes as, hey, just checking, are you still interested in hearing from us? A one off email. Okay. With just that in it. And this is where preference signals become really important. You can actually invite people to tell you what's going on instead of just like guessing. All right, so some examples of a preference signal that you could offer. You're like, what does that mean? Corinna, you could have like actually in the email, like not interested right now or I still want emails or this product wasn't for me or not interested in chicken or I want to learn more about beef. Right. And depending on what they click, that will then trigger or add tags to them so that you better know how to serve them with your communications. Because behind the scenes, clicking is engagement. If somebody's clicking in an email, not necessarily a click to purchase something, but if they're clicking in some other way, that's engagement. If someone's clicking anything, even a not right now link, that tells you and your system that this person is still paying attention. So when someone clicks, they're engaged now, they should be removed from your cold category. As a result, even if they still don't buy, at least they're engaging with you. Okay? And they just stay on your general list, you know that they're at least reading it and they could warm up again three, four or five months from now. That is a win. Even if they didn't buy. Okay, now if someone ignores all three of your emails in a win back sequence, if you do one of those, there's like no opens, no clicks, no purchases. That's also information. Doesn't mean you failed. It means that at least for now, this relationship is going nowhere. It is dormant. And at that point you have a few options. You could decide, I'm going to keep them on my list anyway and it'll make your open rates go down. It kind of the health of your list will diminish. But maybe that's worth it for you because they may reactivate, they may come out of their season, they're in in a few months or in a year, and suddenly they're interested. Another option is you could move them to a low frequency list. You could mark them that way, right? Or you could mark them as a list cleanup candidate after, let's say six to 12 months. I usually do after 12 months for sure. And then you clean them and take them off your list. Or as you clean them, you could put them onto a different like Google sheet somewhere and just hold on to them for a while, even if they're not in your actual email service provider. And always add them back in later if you want. Up to you. So I want to be really clear about this part. Removing someone from your list is not mean, it's not personal. It's actually respectful because you're saying, hey, I'm not going to keep showing up in your inbox. If you're clearly not interested. And if they are and they miss you and they, they suddenly decide six months from now that they want to get back into your world, they'll go and subscribe to your list again. Okay, so this is just good stewardship. If you decide to clean your list up and you've gone through all the motions and you've tried to win them back and you've done your due diligence, it's okay to let them go. That's just good stewardship of your list, of your energy. It's good stewardship of your business. So the big takeaway here is a win back campaign isn't about forcing people to come back, it's about inviting them. It's about paying attention to their behavior instead of making up all kinds of stories in your head about what their behavior means. Okay, Clicks are information, silence is information. And both help you make decisions, better decisions moving forward. Okay, so that answers the question, is it ever okay to remove people from your list? I say yes. If people haven't opened anything in 12 months, like no clicks, no opens, no preference signals whatsoever, then yeah, I feel like that's pretty good. Safe bet that you could remove them all. Right, before we land this plane, I want to make sure that I talk about the text part that's happening behind the scenes. Once you send out those win back campaign emails, if they purchase at any point, you want to make sure that you have set up the tech and the rules in your automation so that they get removed from the cold buyer tag. Right? And then you want to add the reactivated tag or Some other kind of tag that shows that hey, they're okay, they're back on the list. And the reason I like adding reactivated, like putting that tag on them is because that helps me know that at one point in time they were cold, right? If we just take off the cold buyer tag and they got, you know, no evidence of ever having been a cold buyer, then I'm not going to know that they were once at risk and came back. That's just good data for me to see that reactivated tag there and be like, oh, at one point they went silent so that if it happens again I may be like, okay, maybe this is just a pattern for them and they're going to come back around. It's just good data. So like to always keep that tag sitting around on their account if they purchase. You could also as an option trigger some kind of a post purchase love sequence. And this is a special email automated email sequence that you write in advance that only goes out to these people who have been cold, who have been lost and have come back and have been found again and are starting to buy from you. And it's a series of emails that welcomes them back, that thanks them, that loves on them, that maybe gives them a second offer. And if you're inside of our marketing school again, this project will actually have an example of what that kind of an email sequence could look like so that you could quickly build one if you would choose to do that. In which case you would have to create a trigger, some kind of an automation that says, hey, when someone buys who's been on the cold buyer list, A, remove the cold buyer tag, B add the tag reactivated and C trigger and add them to the post purchase love sequence. Okay, now if they click on the email but they don't buy, they don't, they don't click on the, the link that takes them to buy the product, but they click on any other link in that email. You want to remove the cold buyer tag, right? They should no longer, they're no longer at risk because they showed you through some preference signals that they're still paying attention to you. They should stay on your general list. So make sure you remove the cold buyer tag and you can tag them with another kind of tag that indicates that they have reactivated but they're not necessarily buying yet. And if they ignore all three emails, they don't take any bait. You could keep up, keep them for now on your list or you could choose to manually move all of those people to a low frequency list or just remove them and delete them. Especially if it's been six to 12 months. That's something you should definitely think about. All right, well, that's kind of the 101 of how win back campaigns work. And I just want to go back to my dog Daisy. Right, let's just think back. My little cutie dog who got her nose stuck in the voles and just would not pay attention to me. Look, customers are, they're not being disobedient. They're not saying I don't love you anymore. Oftentimes the reason they're not coming back and they've stopped buying is because they're just focused elsewhere. And so your job is to gently remind them, hey, I'm still here. I got this cool thing, you want to come back. So I want you to remember my dog Daisy the next time you see your customers who haven't bought for a while. And I want to just challenge you instead of going to the worst case scenario and catastrophizing the future and assuming that they don't like you and there's something wrong with you, let's assume the best. Let's assume no. There's all kinds of other good reasons for why they've lost track of my brand, why they've fallen off the radar. And I can simply invite them back with a really great offer and coax them back into my community love on them for a while and try to get them to return. And I can at least try it. And if they don't take the bait, then I have the option to release them. It's a very loving gesture and it's well worth your time. Listen, you worked hard to get these people onto your list and in many cases to start buying from you. And so for me, the ROI here, the potential ROI here, is a whole lot better than someone who's never bought from me before, ever. It's a lot easier to reactivate someone who once purchased than someone who never ever has. So it's definitely worth a little bit of effort to try this at least a couple times a year. And what I like to do is have like a time in my year. Usually the off season is a obvious one when I'm not super busy with a farming rhythms and to go in and like do this work of figuring out who these cool clients are and just issue a comeback offer and then I try to do it one other time in the year. That's all you got to do. It's not hard. Once you build the system, you just literally repeat it. Every single time. I do not write a brand new comeback offer. Every single year. It's the same one. It's the same one. So it's not hard and it's just a matter of like putting it in my promotion calendar. Oh, make sure you go and figure out who your cold clients are. Send them that win back email and see what happens. Right. I do that twice a year so this is an easy thing to set in place. Like I said, if you want the step by step, you can get this done in a matter of days. Like I would say, this is under 5 hours. Easy to get this whole thing completely set up in your tech and get the emails written. Especially when you just take the templates from the project inside of our marketing school. So if you want to check that out, go to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS After February 1st, this project will be in there. All right, today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 344 and if you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review or take a screenshot of this episode and share it with me on Instagram ydigitalfarmer and I'll repost it on my stories. I just love to hear that people are listening to the show and I would love more people to find out that it even exists. There are so many good resources on here and you know, a lot of this is just evergreen content that's going to be good for a very long time, even long past when I stopped doing digital farmer like this will exist forever and you'll be able to go back and just listen to it. The same principles will hold. So let other people know it exists. Remember, if you want to get onto my email list, I have some free marketing tools and tips to send your way that are going to turn you into a marketing maven. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe, get on that list and soak it all in. Put it into your saved folder and just read those emails. Take action on the ones you get excited about. All right, awesome. Well, thank you guys for joining me today. I'm still in the parking lot. I'll be here for another 30 minutes, but I hope you have an amazing week and I'll catch you next time. Remember, I believe in you. Bye Bye. Sam.