The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

B2B SaaS Reactivation Emails for Dead Leads (And Mistakes To Avoid)

by 

Mike Smith

Last updated: August 23rd, 2024

If a lead doesn’t close, most B2B SaaS marketers either abandon it altogether, or their attempts to close it in the future without keeping the lead warm in the meantime ultimately fail.

Yet cold leads were once prospects that expressed interest in your business, indicating that they clearly have a problem your product solves. Additionally, you’ve already invested substantial time and resources into attracting and nurturing them.

Even if this isn’t the right time for that prospect to buy your product, you still have a good chance of closing them in the future as they already understand the value of your product and require significantly less nurturing than a brand new prospect.

In this post, we’ll discuss key mistakes SaaS marketers make when reviving cold leads and our strategy to help clients re-engage, convert, and close dead leads.

Do you need help reactivating and closing more leads? Reach out for your free marketing plan and we’ll show you how to improve your pipeline to close more deals.

Key Mistakes with Reactivation Emails

If you are actively re-engaging cold leads, but they still aren’t converting, here are a few mistakes that could hurt your conversion rates.

Manually Sending Reactivation Emails

If your team manually sends reactivation emails, there’s a good chance this task will be forgotten if other pressing matters arise, and you’ll end up with an inconsistent reactivation strategy.

Another danger of manually sending reactivation emails is that multiple team members may contact the same prospect multiple times, which creates a negative experience with your brand.

As a result, prospects may mark your messages as spam, or you could lose a prospect who would have otherwise naturally returned to your brand at a more opportune time.

Establishing an automated reactivation system streamlines this process and will make your revival efforts more effective and sustainable.

Targeting Wrong-Fit Leads

Some prospects realize partway through the sales process that the product isn’t a good fit for them, often because the product isn’t the solution to their problem or they don’t fit your ICP (e.g., an SMB researching a product designed for enterprise businesses).

These cold leads won’t (and shouldn’t) convert, so it’s best to remove them from your reactivation automation sequence.

Instead, the best cold leads to reactivate are prospects who are an excellent fit for your product but weren’t in the position to move forward when they last spoke with your team.

For example, perhaps their budget was pulled during the sales conversation, or they were in the middle of an RFP cycle.

To ensure you’re reactivating right-fit prospects, properly set up deal criteria in your CRM and frequently update the closed lost reasons category.

With detailed data on each prospect, you can exclude leads that aren’t a good fit for your product and segment your reactivation list with more targeted messaging in your follow-up emails.

Ineffective Messaging

Another reason your reactivation emails might not convert is that your messages are ineffective.

First, look at your open rates.

A low open rate may indicate that the subject line simply isn’t compelling.

However, it may also indicate that the topic mentioned within the subject line is irrelevant to the lead, which indicates that the content within the email may be irrelevant.

If your open rates are high but conversions are low, you probably have a great subject line, but the copy within your email is ineffective.

One of the biggest mistakes we see marketers make is writing emails that are too long. Prospects don’t have time to read paragraphs, so shorten your emails to just a line or two.

We’ll show you the exact templates we use below.

How To Create An Effective Dead Lead Reviver Sequence

Here’s the step by step process we use to create an automated sequence to revive dead leads.

Step 1: Capture The Right Data In Your CRM

When you send a reactivation email, who you send it to, and the content of that email are all critical to the success of your campaign.

Unfortunately, you won’t have this information if you aren’t capturing this data in your CRM during the sales process.

Specific information to capture in the CRM include:

• The date the deal was lost
• The deal value
• The deal owner
• Decision criteria
• Pain point/challenge

This information allows you to send a more targeted follow-up email. For example, let’s say the prospect’s pain point was that they lacked the resources to scale technical customer support.

In that case, you can tailor your follow-up email to address the specific problem of scaling technical customer support. As a result, your emails will be more relevant to the prospect and appear more personalized.

Step 2: Writing An Effective Reactivation Email

Often, key decision makers won’t read multiple-paragraph emails, so our entire reactivation emails are intentionally a single line – usually about nine words.

This single line should ask the prospect if they solved the primary pain point they were researching during the sales process. Here are a few examples you can use:

• “Are you still looking for a solution to [pain point]?”
• “Is finding a [solution/product/service] still a priority for you?”
• “Do you still need help with [pain point]?”
• “Are you still interested in [product/service?”
• “Do you still want to achieve [objective/goal]?”
• “What competitor did you end up going with?”

Here are a few more examples:

Here are a few other best practices to consider when creating reactivation emails:

• Always use plain text and keep it short – it should look like it’s coming from a real human.
• Add a big block of empty space so that the unsubscribe link is less prominent. We also change the text of the link itself to “Manage your email preferences.”

Step 3: Creating A Reactivation Cadence

Timing also plays a role in the success of your reactivation campaigns. If you send the reactivation email too soon, the prospect’s status likely won’t have changed, so they won’t convert. You also run the risk of annoying prospects if you’re overly persistent.

On the other hand, if you wait too long, the prospect may have forgotten about your product, or the point of contact may have left that company altogether.

To determine the perfect cadence for your reactivation sequences, consider the buying cycle length for your product or service and align the reactivation sequence to coincide with that cadence.

For example, if the end-to-end buying cycle is about 30 days, it might be a good idea to align the reactivation campaign around the 30-day mark.

If your buying cycle is longer than twelve weeks, consider sending reactivation sequences once per quarter. That timeline gives prospects sufficient time to try to solve the problem themselves, but they still remember who your brand is and likely still find the problem painful.

Step 4: Sending The Email

Finally, send the reactivation email from the account owner or whoever had the most contact with that person.

If the recipient doesn’t recognize the email address, they won’t open it. Even if the recipient does open it, they may not remember that it’s your company they spoke with before, as most people remember other people better than brand names.

Get Help Reviving Dead Leads

Reviving dead leads is one way we improve the efficiency of SaaS marketing programs, but there are plenty of other strategies we also use to generate more leads without resorting to traditional methods like increasing ad spend or publishing more content.

To learn more about other low hanging fruit opportunities to improve your content marketing program’s efficiency, reach out to us today.

Get your free marketing plan that covers all of the low hanging fruit you can tackle and other long-term opportunities to increase the efficiency of your SaaS marketing strategy.