The quick start guide to re-engagement email campaigns
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I’ve no doubt you have questions about how to set up an effective re-engagement campaign for your business. Things like why you should be using one, how to set one up, what kinds of emails do you send… so I’m covering all this in this quick start guide.
The quick start guide to re-engagement email campaigns
You’re running an online business. You have customers purchasing and subscribers signing up. The purpose of a marketing strategy is to leverage the fact that you now have a direct line into your customers inbox where you can show your customers that your products really are the best solutions to their problems, or will help them achieve their desired results.
There are many moving parts to an effective email strategy which half hinges on the automation sequences you set up which are sent based on triggers from your subscribers behavior and interaction with your emails, website and social media.
One such sequence you should be using is a re-engagement campaign.
What is a re-engagement campaign?
First let’s clear up what a campaign is. THis is just a marketing term given to a sequence or a single marketing initiative based around a message or idea. In regards to a re-engagement sequence, we’re talking about a sequence of emails that get sent to subscribers when they become “disengaged” from your brand.
Being disengaged simply means that your reader or customers hasn’t interacted with your emails, your website or haven’t purchased from you within a set period of time.
3 reasons why you should use a re-engagement email sequence
Your products do wonderful things for your customers, so I’m sure you’ll want them to continue to purchase from you. Yet for some reason they’ve stopped engaging with your emails. This becomes a problem because:
1. Subscribers cost you money
With many Email Service Providers (ESP) the cost of your service is dependent on how many subscribers you have. This isn’t a problem if you have subscribers who are opening your emails, clicking through to your website and buying your products. Even if they do just one of those three, there’s the opportunity for them to become customer.
As soon as they stop opening your emails, they become “dormant”. Sitting in your ESP like a bear hibernating in winter. Only there’s a chance they may never wake up. And that means you’re paying for their caves to be heated and kept clean while they continue to snooze through all your great offers.
You may just have to kick them out of the bear cave if they’re not interested in your products anymore. Why pay for room and board when there’s nothing in return. But wait… don’t just throw them out with the bathwater… use a re-engagement campaign
2. Disengaged readers affect your reputation
The more subscribers you have on your list who are not opening your emails, the more likely it is to affect deliverability.
This means emails that could have gone to someone’s inbox now goes to their spam folder because the likes of Google and Microsoft have received the signal that your emails are not very interesting… an interpretation they make based on the fact of the number of emails getting opened with each send.
You don’t want the bad apples to rot the cart, so it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to deploy your re-engagement campaign.
3. You’re leaving money on the table
There may be gold hiding in those dormant bear-caves! What if you could wake those bears up and... ka-ching… encourage them to buy from you again (or at least open your emails by reminding them what an awesome brand you have and then one day… pow… they buy).
How do you wake them up? With a re-engagement campaign of course.
When to use a re-engagement email campaign
So now you know why you need an re-engagement sequence. Let’s dig into the logistics. Knowing when to deploy these emails will come down to your personal choice. Identifying who has become disengaged is the first step.
This isn’t whether someone has purchased from you in a while (for that you would use a “win-back campaign”), no... this is if they’ve not opened your emails in a set time. And a good timeframe for this is 60-90 days.
The trigger can be automated (depending on the features of your ESP), for example: IF subscriber hasn’t opened an email in 90 days, SEND “operation re-engage” sequence.
This will then deploy automatically once your subscriber falls into this behaviour.
The other way is to plan in a campaign every quarter and do this all manually. The difference being that you’ll have some subscribers who haven’t engaged for longer than 90 days as they may fall into this segment the day after your manual campaign sends, leaving your customer dormant for a possible 180 days.
How to run a re-engagement campaign
First of all you’ll need to segment your subscribers. This will either happen automatically like I mentioned before, or you will manually tag those subscribers who have not opened your emails within your determined timeframe.
Next you’ll want to choose how you want to categorise your re-engaged subscriber. Are they classed as re-engaged when they open? Or do they need to click and take a more formative action for you to consider them “engaged” and therefore they have been checked off as a success for your re-engagement campaign.
The reason you’ll want to define this is because it will be relevant to how you remove them from your re-engagement campaign, since you’ll probably have multiple emails in your sequence trying to get them to react. This will also be relevant to what you will be sending them in the email, which I’ll get to in a minute.
So, define your goal first before you start planning on how you’re going to run this campaign.
How many emails should a re-engagement campaign be?
This question is like “how long is a piece of string?”. It can be as long or short as you want and again, it depends on the goal and content of the emails.
The idea though is once your goal has been reached then your subscriber is removed from the sequence.
For example, let’s say your goal is to get your subscriber to open an email because they’ve not opened one in the last 90 days. You add them to the segment that triggers the re-engagement campaign and wait.
Three emails get sent but they don’t open. On the fourth email, the subject line causes enough curiosity to get them to open and voila, the goal is met and they don’t receive anymore emails from the campaign. They are then returned to your regular email-send-list and life goes on.
So, you could have a sequence of 20 emails sent everyday with very similar content but different subject lines to catch their attention and once they open they don’t receive any more.
Or you could have a sequence of emails with the goal of clicking through to your website. They may open and read several of your sequence emails but until they click through to the site, they will continue to get the sequence UNTIL they click. So with this instance your email sequence needs to take an entirely different approach with the content, which should be a journey that at any point they can jump off the train (click to website).
What do you do with subscribers who don’t re-engage?
Send them to purgatory! No, kidding.
You have a few choices. If your subscriber doesn’t take the action you want them to after you’ve sent them your re-engagement campaign you can delete or archive or suppress.
As an e-commerce store owner you’ll want to make sure that you’re keeping track of customer data so if your subscriber has bought from you in the past it’s probably best not to delete your customer contact.
Your ESP may have the option to archive your subscriber so they don’t count towards your subscriber total, or you download their data and keep in a safe place before you remove them from the ESp.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure you comply with any data protection regulations around storing your archived customers. Alternatively you can keep your email subscribers in your ESP but suppress them from any regular email sends so their inactivity doesn’t bring down the performance of your list.
If your subscriber isn’t a customer, then you’ll most likely want to delete their details from your account so you make room for new engaged subscribers.
The types of emails you can use in a re-engagment campaign
Remember, you may want to send different types of emails to your subscribers depending on their history. Past customers are worth more to you because they’ve already bought from you and might just need reminding that you’re there or that you really value them.
So you might want to consider creating segments for your re-engagement campaign: non-customers, customers, VIP customers (those who have spent over a certain amount with you in a certain timeframe).
Here are a few ideas of the types of emails you can send as part of your re-engagement campaign.
A check-in
This email does what it says on the tin. You check in with your subscriber to see if they still want to hear from you. If they don’t open, or don’t click the link you suggest they click if they want to stay (this is all about affirmative action rather than passive engagement by default).
A bribe
If your goal is to get them to click a link (whatever is on the other side) you might want to entice them with something relevant – perhaps some great content you share or a new guide you’ve put together.
Either way you want to make it sound so juicy and valuable that they can do nothing but click.
Of course the ultimate goal is to get your customers to buy so you’ll have to consider what their journey is to lead them to purchase. Again, segmenting and further sequences would be a good idea here, but you need to be careful not to make it too complicated.
A special offer
You could always go straight in and ask for the sale. By offering a special discount or offer you can entice your disengaged subscriber to become a new customer (or become a returning customer). If you’re sending to past customers this would become a win-back campaign but the label you give it doesn’t matter.
Re-engagement campaigns are all about getting people to respond in some way whether that’s buy, take action or just open an email so you know they’re still alive and potentially interested in your brand and products.
Let’s round this up:
Choose your goal for your re-engagement campaign
Decide what will happen if they do or don’t achieve that goal
Segment your inactives appropriately – subscriber, customer or VIP customer
Create a campaign that is relevant to which segment they fit
Follow through on the action you decided (delete, suppress, add them back into the fold…)
Have questions? Hit me up through my contact form here.