Re-engaging customers can be one of the most powerful, yet overlooked, opportunities in marketing.

When executed properly, re-engagement strategies can reignite customer loyalty and advocacy, and come to deeply value the impact of thoughtful, customer-first programs that bring people back into the conversation.

What re-engagement really means

When we talk about customer re-engagement, it’s easy to get lost in semantics. Is it the same as reactivation? A win-back campaign? The truth is, all of these fall under the broader umbrella of re-engagement. 

At their core, they share a common goal: sparking interaction from customers who have gone quiet, those who aren’t engaging at the moment you need them most.

The specific terminology can vary from brand to brand, especially depending on where customers are in their lifecycle or which segment they belong to. 

In previous roles, , the companies I’ve worked at have defined re-engagement as a strategy designed to produce renewed interaction with our customers. It’s a deliberate tactic to nudge customers toward specific goals – whether that’s platform usage, product education, or deeper adoption.

Why re-engagement matters

When engagement drops, usage tends to follow, and that often leads to churn. But re-engagement allows us to take proactive steps to prevent that. 

Silent accounts are signals. If we don’t act on them, we risk more than just retention metrics – we risk the strength of the customer relationship itself.

Low engagement can damage your brand reputation. Maybe the Account Executive (AE) or the Customer Success Manager (CSM) isn’t the right fit. Maybe the customer’s primary point of contact has moved on. Regardless, if your brand starts to feel distant or disconnected, your customers will notice. Re-engagement programs help you course-correct, rebuild trust, and protect your brand experience.

And let’s be honest, re-engaging a current customer is significantly easier (and cheaper) than acquiring a new one. That’s why this kind of program is essential to any strong retention-focused customer marketing or advocacy strategy.

Why customers go quiet (and why it’s not personal)

We’ve all been there: one day your customer is interacting regularly, and the next…radio silence. As customer marketers, we often wonder, “Did something go wrong? Are they just busy? Or… are they simply not that into us?”

I’ve had those moments too. The truth is, most of the time, it’s not us. Customers are just overwhelmed. 

The average person sees hundreds of ads per day. On top of that, the Radicati Group reported that as far back as 2015, the average office worker was receiving 121 emails daily. That number has only gone up since.

Then add in the constant stream of Slack messages, texts, social notifications, and real-world distractions. One study by Mark, Gudith, and Klocke in 2008 found that we’re interrupted 20 times per hour – and nearly half of those are self-interruptions. We check our phones, scroll social media, or wander off mentally. 

The reality is that everyone is drowning in noise.

So as marketers, the challenge is how we hold that attention.

The psychology of attention and how it shapes re-engagement

To build effective re-engagement programs, we need to understand how attention works. There’s a key distinction between trying to pay attention and deliberately dividing it.

Take driving while listening to a podcast. You’re not truly multitasking; you’re alternating your focus in small bursts, paying just enough attention to both activities. That’s selective attention. 

But real engagement comes from sustained attention, the kind we experience during creative flow or “deep work” sessions.

When we design re-engagement strategies, we should be asking: how can we tap into this kind of sustained attention? How can we go beyond quick wins and instead create meaningful, lasting customer interaction?

These are the questions that guide our thinking at SheerID as we build re-engagement programs that don’t just recapture attention, but hold it.

How to bring re-engagement to life 

So how do we take all this theory and apply it in the real world? In my previous role at SheerID, we developed a high-level strategy for customer re-engagement that’s designed to be clear, actionable, and continuous.

It all starts with planning. When you’re building a re-engagement program, your first step should be to clearly define your objective. Are you reminding customers of the value of your relationship? Are you trying to drive product usage or encourage event attendance? Whatever your goal, make sure the value of re-engaging is obvious to the customer.

Just as importantly, every interaction needs to be actionable. That might mean including a link in an email, prompting a meeting with an AE or CSM, offering an asset download, inviting them to a webinar, or simply allowing them to update their preferences. 

What you don’t want to do is send a vague “Let’s reconnect” message without a clear next step. That won’t move the needle.

Multichannel and lifecycle-first

It’s critical to support your program through a multi-channel strategy that runs across the entire customer lifecycle. This can include paid social campaigns, email nurtures, in-app messaging using tools like Pendo, and virtual events. 

One tactic we found especially effective at SheerID was hosting unique virtual networking experiences – cooking classes, mixology workshops – led by external consultants. They create memorable moments that reconnect customers to our brand in fun, meaningful ways.

We also leveraged platforms like 6sense and UserGems to refine targeting and outreach. And, of course, we align closely with our AE and CSM teams to layer in personalized calls and emails that make our outreach feel high-touch and genuinely human.

Segment before you activate

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is launching re-engagement without proper segmentation. When you’ve lost contact with a customer, you have to be especially careful and intentional about how you reconnect. That means knowing who your audience is, what qualifies them for re-engagement, and when they’re most likely to respond.

You can use a variety of triggers (such as inactivity length or customer health scores) to move customers in and out of our programs dynamically. This segmentation is key to sending the right message at the right time to create real, meaningful engagement.

Score it, measure it, improve it

From the very beginning, work with your CX or CS teams to define what re-engagement success looks like. 

We created a “re-engagement score” that incorporates several signals: email opens, content downloads, meetings set, calls completed – anything that reflects renewed interest and interaction. By rolling these into a single percentage-based score, we can measure effectiveness and iterate as we go.

Once your program is live, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” Follow-up is essential. Whether that’s a check-in call, a personal invite to an event, or a small gift with a handwritten note, every touchpoint helps build momentum. These surprise-and-delight moments go a long way in making customers feel seen and valued.

Personalization and feedback are non-negotiable

The worst thing you can do after a customer re-engages is bombard them with irrelevant content. 

Once you’ve regained their attention, you need to protect it. That’s why we always include a feedback survey in our re-engagement workflows. It helps us understand what they want more of, what they don’t care about, and how we can tailor their experience going forward.

A personalized experience isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a foundational piece of a successful re-engagement strategy. If you break their trust by being generic or pushy, they’ll tune you out again.

Make re-engagement continuous

Re-engagement shouldn’t be treated as a one-off campaign that you launch after a specific period of silence. It needs to be a continuous element of your customer marketing strategy – something that operates across the lifecycle with intelligent triggers and dynamic entry points.

That also means documenting which re-engagement tactics map to each phase of the lifecycle, and identifying where customers might be stalling. From there, you can prioritize the highest-impact campaigns, plug the gaps, and ensure you’re always guiding your customers forward.

Re-engagement isn’t a side project. It’s an investment in the long-term health of your customer relationships.

Tools that power our re-engagement strategy

I want to spotlight a few tools that have been truly transformational for past re-engagement efforts. These aren’t always top-of-mind for customer marketers, but they’ve helped us engage more meaningfully, act proactively, and create genuine moments of connection with our customers.

UserGems: Staying ahead of change

One of my favorite tools is UserGems. It gives our team automated visibility into job title and role changes among our contacts, allowing CSMs to proactively reach out when a primary point of contact leaves or shifts roles within the company. 

It also gives your AEs and SDRs the ability to build warm introductions with new stakeholders and identify fresh opportunities.

This can be built directly into Salesforce – UserGems updates contact records with new company info, titles, and email addresses when available. These updates can be surfaced through dashboards and automated reports that keep everyone aligned, especially your executive team. CSMs and SDRs are then notified in real time when a contact change is detected.

When we undertook this at SheerID, we paired this with structured workflows and SLAs. For example, if a key advocate left, CSMs were expected to reach out to the existing account team within 48 hours to ask who should replace them, and within five days, they were to initiate warm outreach to the contact in their new role. 

We even provided message templates to make this as easy and repeatable as possible.

To make these touchpoints more personal and memorable, we integrated Sendoso. When a contact landed a new role, we triggered a congratulatory gift – like a local coffee blend – with a message that read: 

“As you explore new terrain, fill up on a coffee from the SheerID team. Congrats on the new gig – we hope you bring us along for the ride.” 

It’s a simple gesture, but it sparks smiles and creates a lasting impression.

What makes UserGems so powerful is that it doesn’t just help retain existing customers; it opens doors through advocates who move on and can champion us in new organizations. It also helps you to get ahead of churn risk by flagging account changes early and arming new stakeholders with the information they need to stay connected to your platform and your value.

6sense: Uncovering hidden intent

We also used 6sense, which was a game-changer for uncovering intent signals that would otherwise stay hidden. 

It helped us detect when customers were researching competitors or exploring new features,  us powerful insights into churn risk, upsell opportunities, and lifecycle engagement.

How does it work?

6sense pulls from a mix of first-party website behavior, third-party intent data, historical engagement patterns, and CRM data. For us, this started with reducing churn – we worked closely with the CS team to flag accounts that are signaling interest in competitors. Those insights feed directly into Salesforce, where we can act fast with competitive positioning and personalized nurture strategies.

We also used 6sense to uncover upsell potential. By analyzing search terms, content downloads, and page visits, we can identify expansion opportunities within accounts and deliver targeted nurture streams to build momentum.

And of course, 6sense played a big role in our re-engagement efforts. We used it to serve relevant content at just the right time – whether it’s product walk-throughs, landing pages, case studies, or webinar invitations. The data allowed us to tailor our outreach based on where a customer is in their journey and what they're actively exploring.

This approach blends keyword intent, competitive signals, and lifecycle insights to build powerful segments. If you follow the same model, your CS team can then use this data for proactive outreach, while your marketing team can use it for paid social targeting that leads customers to content aligned with their search behavior.

It’s also applicable for deepening your account-level insights. For example, you can drill into a specific account and see how many Directors or VPs you’ve actually reached. If you find gaps, say, five contacts not yet engaged, you know exactly where to focus your efforts. I’ve found that, typically, accounts with more decision-makers involved (roughly four to five Director-level or higher) consistently show stronger advocacy and retention.

Final thoughts and takeaways

Re-engagement programs are designed with one core purpose: to prompt action and sustain attention from customers who have disengaged. They’re not just reactive – they’re proactive, strategic efforts that can be deployed whenever a segment of your customer base stops moving forward with your brand. 

That might be a drop in product usage, a lull in meeting activity, or a lack of content engagement. Whatever the signal, it’s a sign that you need to step in.

The most effective re-engagement programs are holistic. They don’t operate in isolation or at just one moment in time – they’re woven through every stage of the customer lifecycle. From onboarding to expansion, these programs should be dynamic, adaptive, and always aligned with your customer’s journey.

But here’s the important part: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Every brand is different, and so is every customer base. The nuances matter. That’s why it’s critical to look closely at your own data – at the behaviors, signals, and stories it reveals. 

Use that insight to shape a strategy that reflects your goals, your voice, and your customer experience.

This article was derived from Crystal's appearance at the virtual Customer Marketing Summit in October 2023. She formally held the position of Director, Customer Marketing at SheerID, but is now B2B Enterprise Customer Advocacy at Canva.