When it comes to growing your business, you hear a lot about getting new leads and closing sales. But what about the nurturing that happens in between? Every year, about 25% of your email subscribers will become inactive. Those contacts may be stale, but they can be revived with a re-engagement email campaign.
What Is a Re-Engagement Email Sequence?
A re-engagement email sequence is a series of messages that are intended to revive subscribers who haven’t interacted with you in a while. They may have stopped opening your emails or clicking through on your calls to action.
A successful re-engagement campaign has two objectives:
- Motivate an audience that was once engaged with your brand to interact with you again
- Weed out the truly inactive subscribers
Re-engaging contacts that supported you in the past is more economical than campaigning for new subscribers. A disengaged audience is already somewhat familiar with your brand. While you may not have their attention, you don’t have to start from square one to recapture it.
In addition to rousing a slumbering audience, you need to ensure that you’re removing subscribers who aren’t likely to re-engage with you. Irrelevant or uninterested contacts are more likely than engaged subscribers to mark your emails as spam. They also needlessly increase your email marketing budget if you pay per send. Cleaning out your email list allows you to create engaged segments that you can nurture to a conversion.
How Do I Re-Engage an Email List?
Email subscribers may start tuning you out for the following reasons:
- You send too many emails – The average person manages more than 120 business emails each day. If you bombard your audience with too many emails, you may overwhelm them.
- The emails that you send aren’t relevant to the target audience – If a subscriber makes the effort to open your emails only to find that they’re not applicable to them, they may tune you out.
- Your subject lines aren’t attracting attention – A lackluster subject line may get deleted, especially if your subscribers’ inboxes are filled with other, more enticing offerings.
- Your leads aren’t high quality – An enormous email list isn’t going to generate revenue if the subscribers aren’t interested in what you offer. Buying lists and paying for irrelevant subscribers leads to lack of engagement.
You can use your awareness of the above factors to craft effective re-engagement campaigns. The emails that you send in hopes of revamping a stale list should be timely, relevant, enticing and valuable.
How Do I Start a Re-Engagement Campaign?
Reaching out to disengaged subscribers can feel a lot like touching base with an ex. It may be daunting, but you can take the following steps to develop a strategy that operates while you sleep. If you craft your emails with care, you won’t have to worry about the subscribers that you can’t resuscitate. Identifying and eliminating the dead weight is as beneficial for your email list as perking up promising leads.
Step 1: Segment Your Audience
At minimum, you should divide your list into segments that reflect the amount of time that they’ve been disengaged. Contacts that haven’t opened your emails for a year are going to respond differently than those that have only been inactive for three months.
Therefore, you might want to segment your list into subscribers that haven’t opened an email from you in 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. You can further break down the list by identifying other classifications that would affect the relevance, appeal and value of a particular email.
For example, you may want to group your list by:
- Subscribers that have purchased something from you and those who have not
- Contacts that have opened specific types of emails, such as those that offered coupons or discounts
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Purchasing behaviors
As your groupings become more specific, you can generate highly relevant re-engagement emails for each sector.
Step 2: Decide What Each Segment Will Find Highly Valuable and Relevant
Although your ultimate goal is to end up with as many active subscribers as possible, your route will be different for each group. Assign a specific goal for each segment.
For example, a customer that has purchased from you within the past year may not need as much prodding to buy from you again as a lead who has never clicked through an email. Therefore, you may send an email offering an exclusive discount to the first customer and a fun re-introduction video to the second one.
Someone who opens and clicks on your email links may be more likely to engage with a re-engagement survey or giveaway than someone who rarely interacts with your messages.
Step 3: Create and Automate Your Emails
After you have identified distinct segments and developed a goal for each one, you can craft the emails. One of the simplest re-engagement emails that you can send to the most disengaged segment simply asks them if they’re still interested. On the other hand, re-engaging someone who has purchased from you in the past may involve sending targeted product recommendations based on the items that they’ve browsed on your site.
Think of each email as a template that you can send out repeatedly to a similar audience. Now, you can automate the re-engagement campaign. Use the tools that your newsletter platform, email service provider or third-party application offers to set rules for outgoing and incoming emails.
Doing this allows your re-engagement campaign to operate around the clock. The service provider will drip out targeted emails to each segment based on their behavior or lack of it.
You can also create guidelines for post-send actions. For instance, you can automate unsubscribe activity for recipients that don’t open your re-engagement email within 60 days.
How Many Emails Are in a Re-Engagement Campaign?
The number of emails in a re-engagement campaign will change depending on the grouping. Let’s say that you send a message to subscribers who haven’t opened an email in 12 months. The email asks them whether they want to remain on the list. You’ll get one of the following responses from each recipient:
- They won’t open the email.
- They’ll open the email but won’t choose to stay subscribed or unsubscribed.
- They’ll ask to stay subscribed.
- They’ll ask to unsubscribe
If they ask to unsubscribe, you can remove them from the list completely. This contact won’t receive more emails from you.
If they don’t open the email, you can decide whether it’s worth sending one more message. You might also wait a pre-determined period of time before removing them from your list.
The leads that open the email but don’t respond are tricky. They are aware of your messages and willing to open them. You may want to send out an email sequence that nurtures them back into your good graces.
Those that request to stay subscribed are your most valuable leads. You should create a sales funnel that makes them feel welcome and helps them stay engaged from here on out.
Types of Emails in a Re-Engagement Campaign
If you owned a brick-and-mortar retail shop, you wouldn’t run outside and grab an old customer that you recognized just because they weren’t stopping at your store anymore. Your re-engagement emails should be similarly subtle. Remember to offer something that’s enticing and valuable to each segment.
You can get creative by using one of the following strategies:
- Offer a discount or coupon
- Run a contest or giveaway
- Ask for feedback on a new product or service
- Promote a holiday special
- Offer a valuable how-to video
- Give away a free gift
No matter which type of email you use, you should measure the success of each campaign. Monitor which subject lines work better and which offerings are the most enticing for each group.
Get Ready to Send Your Re-Engagement Emails
The only way to know whether a re-engagement email campaign will revive your list is to set it up and track its success.
If you’re ready to get started, use the following checklist to ensure that you’re ready to press send:
- Analyze past emails to determine whether you need to alter their frequency, content, subject lines and relevance.
- Divide your audience into segments.
- Decide what each segment will find valuable.
- Craft an email or series of messages for each group.
- Automate the email sequence and post-send actions.
- Monitor open and click rates.
- Adjust the campaigns as necessary.
If you follow these steps, the only thing that you have to lose is the number of leads that you had already lost. Identifying those is just as beneficial as transforming dispassionate subscribers into enthusiastic customers.