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The importance of recipient engagement
A typical mailing list has more than 50% of recipients that are inactive recipients (shown in grey from the Recipient analysis chart). Marketers face a big challenge in terms of recipient engagement. In most cases, having a cleaner (albeit smaller) mailing size is preferred, if the goal of your email communications is to increase engagement, as shown in this case study by Marketing Sherpa.
To get an idea of how many of your recipients are inactive (i.e. those recipients who have not opened and/or clicked on your emails in the last 3 months or longer), check information can be found under Statistics > Email > Analysis and Benchmarks
. By inactive, we mean those recipients that have not opened and/or clicked on your emails in the last 3 months or longer.
In MailUp, you can quickly find out what this figure is for each of your lists by looking at the gray area in the Recipient analysis chart in your MailUp admin console under Statistics > Email > Analysis and Benchmarks (e.g. below is a visual example).
Why is this important? Because more and more email account service providers (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) use "recipient engagement" as a fundamental indicator of whether your messages should be delivered to the inbox or not. Are recipients opening and/or clicking? How often?
The higher the number of recipients that are inactive, the lower - by definition - will be your engagement level and the higher the chances that - over time - your messages may end up in the junk folder.
Here's a simple example. Let's say that around 15,000 recipients open your emails - on average - and you mail to 100,000 people. So your open rate is around 15%. Now, let's say that 30,000 of them are inactive: they have not opened or clicked on any message in 90 days or more. If you decided not to email to them, your open rate would instantly increase to 21.42%. That's a 43% increase in "engagement"!
This topic is so important that you can find a tremendous amount of literature on it. For example, take a look at this case study by Marketing Sherpa.
Clearly, there are two conflicting priorities:
- You don't want to reduce your recipient list
- You also don't want to end up in the junk folder
What should you do then? The answer is to try to re-engage as many "inactive" recipients as possible and - for those that you are unable to re-activate - reduce the amount of messages sent to them, eventually unsubscribing them.
In this document, we will look at how you can accomplish all of the above in MailUp.
Step 1: locating inactive recipient using activity filters
Under Marketing+ > Filters > Activity, create an activity filter to locate recipients that did not open or click on a message in the last N days. N can vary depending on how frequently you email to your customers:
- If you email frequently (e.g. once a week), you can set N to 90 (i.e. recipients that have not clicked or opened in the last 90 days)
- If you email rather infrequently (e.g. once a month), you may want to set it to a higher value (e.g. 180 days).
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Make sure that the settings for the third message have been configured compatibly with the Activity filters created for the first 2 messages of the re-engagement campaign: in other words, make sure that this third message is not sent before the other two  |
Reducing the mailing frequency
While you are running your re-engagement campaign, you could consider reducing the mailing frequency of your "regular" campaigns sent to inactive recipients (the same recipients that you are trying to re-activate). This will have a positive impact on your average engagement as inactive recipients will be "skipped" in some of your regular campaigns. In MailUp there are settings that allow you do to so under managing inactive recipients.
Step 4: Evaluate your re-engagement campaign
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