How to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign

Do you want to know how to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign?

Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses small and large but whilst there is a lot of emphasis on growing your list there is no point having a massive list if your subscribers aren’t engaged and aren’t opening your emails.

Any serious business owner will regularly clean their mailing list to ensure all of their subscribers are active. However, once you’ve discovered your inactive subscribers there is something you can do before deleting them from your system. You can run a re-engagement email marketing campaign and if they don’t respond to that you then delete them.

Keep on reading to find out how to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign for your business.

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Before I share how to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign, I want to ensure you are clear on why having a mailing list full of active subscribers is important.

 

Why it is important to have a mailing list of active or engaged email subscribers?

 

Building an email list takes time and work so I know how hard it can be to delete subscribers that you have on your list. To see the size of your mailing list decrease may be painful, but list size is a vanity metric. The size of your mailing list isn’t the most important thing – the health is (and a healthy mailing list is a mailing list full of active subscribers who are opening your emails and clicking through if applicable).

 

To put this into perspective here are two examples:

 

EXAMPLE 1: Mailing list size is 10,000 and has an average open rate of 30%

 

EXAMPLE 2: Mailing list size is 8,000 and has an average open rate of 50%.

Example 1 has a larger mailing list, but fewer subscribers are opening the email (on average). In example 1 3,000 subscribers are opening the emails and in example 2 4,000 subscribers are opening the emails.

 

Hopefully, this demonstrates that the overall size of your list is not the most important thing. In fact, in some cases example 1 will be having to pay more for their email service provider than example 2 even those fewer subscribers are opening their emails.

 

Having a healthy list not only means that you aren’t overpaying (which none of us wants to do), but it also helps with the deliverability of your emails, and for you to be able to really understand your list and do better segmentation or targeting.

 

The purpose of a re-engagement email marketing campaign

 

Hopefully you now understand why having a healthy mailing list with active subscribers is important and maybe you are eager to log into your email service provider and delete all your inactive subscribers. However, I would urge you to not do that before you’ve run a re-engagement email marketing campaign.

 

As I mentioned earlier the likelihood is that as a business you put time or money into gaining your subscribers so rather than just finding inactive subscribers and deleting them you can send a few emails designed specifically to re-engage the subscribers. That is what a re-engagement email marketing campaign is. It is simply a series of emails that are sent to inactive subscribers with the purpose of encouraging them to open your emails and re-engage with the company. If they re-engage then you keep them on your list and if they don’t you delete them.

 

Now that you know the purpose, I’ll walk you through how to set up your own.

 

How to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign for your business

Due to the number of different email service providers (Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Convertkit etc) there are I can’t show you exactly how to set your campaign up in your email service provider. However, if you would like 1:1 support to get your re-engagement marketing campaign you can enquire to work with me by using my contact form.

 

Regardless of the email service provider, you’ll follow the steps for creating the campaign are the same.

 

1. Segment your inactive subscribers

The first thing you need to do is segment your inactive subscribers. This simply means being able to identify them. Depending on your business and how often you send out emails your definition of inactive may be different. However, most businesses class a subscriber as inactive if they haven’t engaged within the last 6 to 12 months.

 

Once you’ve decided on what “inactive” means to you you’ll want to set up a rule or automation in your email service provider that means once a subscriber hasn’t opened an email for X days they are automatically tagged. For ease I’ll say that those subscribers are tagged as RE-ENGAGE and this means you know they’ve been inactive and you now want to re-engage them.

 

 

2. Create your re-engagement email campaign

Now you have a system set up for inactive subscribers to be identified and tagged, but what are you going to send to them?

 

 

There are 3 main things you need to decide on for your campaign:

1. The number of emails you’ll send
2. The subject line of each email
3. The contents of each email

 

1. The number of emails you’ll send

Notice that the phrase I’ve been using throughout is a re-engagement email campaign. Ideally this shouldn’t be just one email but a number of emails. People are busy and inboxes even more so. That means if you really want to engage your inactive subscribers you should send a few emails to maximise the chance of the campaign re-engaging them.

 

2. The subject line of each email

Subject lines are always important, but even more so for re-engagement email campaigns. Remember at this stage the main purpose is to get people to open your emails and make a choice about whether they want to keep hearing from you or they want to unsubscribe. Therefore, you need to have strong subject lines that make it clear you want to know if they want to hear from you and ultimately that they are about to be deleted from your mailing list.

 

Here are some examples of possible subject lines:

• You haven’t read my recent messages. Should I stop emailing you?
• Do you still want to hear from me?
• I noticed you’ve been a little distant lately
• Do you still want updates from me?
• It’s been a while
• I miss you, [name]
• Is this goodbye?

 

As you can tell from these examples you want to be as upfront as possible about the fact some time has passed since they last engaged and that if no action is taken, they’ll stop hearing from you.

 

 

3. The Email

Hurrah! They have opened your email, but what do they find inside.

 

When it comes to the content of your email you have numerous options and obviously the more emails in your campaign the more you can experiment. However, here are some options to get your creative juices following.

 

1. Remind subscribers why they joined

Use this opportunity to remind subscribers why they joined and what they can expect from you. This will help subscribers make an informed decision about whether your emails are still relevant to them.

 

2. Give them a discount

Part of the reason you are running the re-engagement campaign is to have a healthy email list that results in sales for your business. Just because someone has been inactive for a while doesn’t mean that they aren’t open to buying from you. Including a discount is a great way to not only be improving the health of your list but also increasing revenue in your business.

 

3. Ask them up to update their preferences

If your subscribers are able to update their preference you could direct them to update their preferences. This will help you to understand them more and ensure future emails are more relevant.

 

4. Encourage them to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in receiving your emails

The aim of the re-engagement campaign is to either have an active subscriber or a deleted subscriber. At this point, you should be comfortable with people unsubscribing so make it clear that if they don’t want to hear from you anymore they can unsubscribe and encourage them to do so.

 

3. Start running your re-engagement email campaign

Once you’ve made the decision about how many emails, the subject lines and the content you have everything you need to run your campaign. You’ll need to log into your email service provider and create an automated email sequence.

 

Once the automated email sequence is set up you can put everything together to run your campaign.

• Subscribers who have not opened an email within X days are tagged RE-ENGAGE.
• Your automated email sequence is sent to anyone who is tagged RE-ENGAGE.
• If during the sequence the subscriber takes a desired action they have another tag added to them (or you can remove the RE-ENGAGE tag) and don’t receive the rest of the sequence.
• If at the end of the sequence the subscriber hasn’t opened any emails or taken a desired action they are deleted for your mailing list.

 

** PRO TIP ** – If you really want to take your email marketing to the next level you could have a nurture sequence for all those who engage with your re-engagement campaign.

 

There you have it! You now know how to create a re-engagement email marketing campaign.

 

Now I know that might have felt like a lot of things to consider and to do, but the beauty of email marketing is once you have taken the time to set everything up once it will keep on running with very limit input from you.

 

Having a healthy list email is important and yes you can absolutely just once a month check who hasn’t engaged in the last x months and delete them, but as I said right back at the beginning you made the effort to get them on your list in the first place, so I believe it is worth making the effort to get a re-engagement marketing campaign set up to try and retain them.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I can’t go into detail about the tech side of tagging and creating the automated email sequence because each email service provider works slightly different. However, if you would like 1:1 support then I can help you to work out exactly how many emails to say, what the subject lines should be, what the content of each email should be and then get it all set up.

 

To get in touch fill in my contact form here or book a free discovery call here.

 

In the comments let me know if this has been helpful and if you have any other questions related to email marketing.