How to run a re-engagement campaign

Overview

A typical mailing list has more than 50% of 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

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).

Here is how the activity filter will look. 

Now create a new filter adding some more time to the amount of days that the recipients have been inactive.

• If you had used 90 in the first filter, now use 105 (i.e. another two weeks of inactivity)
• If you had used 180 in the first filter, now use 210 (i.e. another month of inactivity)

You will use this second filter for the second message of your re-engagement campaign.

Once you've created both filters - which you could assign to a "Re-engagement" category - you should see in the list of Activity filters:

You can now use these filters:

1. At any time to locate recipients in your List
2. When executing a manual mailing: select the filter that you wish to use in the Choose recipients page (the mailing setup page)
3. When executing an automated campaign using triggered messages

Before you actually send the messages, though, let's step back for a second and think about what kind of message you may want to send to try to re-engage inactive recipients.

Step 2: Plan your re-engagement email campaign

The goal of the campaign is to win-back and try to engage the inactive recipients. Effective "win-back" emails include:

• Connect & join us on social media
• Subscribe to multiple mailing lists or a different mailing list
• One-time promotions (e.g. sweepstake), offers, or price discounts
• Download marketing material (e.g. whitepaper) or sign-up to a webinar

The objective of your emails should be to provide a compelling reason for your recipients to keep subscribed to your mailing list(s).

The timing and number of emails is up to you to decide. Best practices include:

• Sending two messages that attempt to re-engage and a final message that notifies the recipient that they will be unsubscribed
• Having those messages be fairly close to each other: how close depends on how frequently you normally send messages
  
  • If you email frequently, consider sending back-to-back messages (e.g. two weeks apart)
  • If you email less frequently, let a bit more time pass between the two mailings
• Sending a final, third message in which you notify the recipient that they have been unsubscribed. This message contains a final option for the recipient to subscribe again. Otherwise, they will not hear from you again.

So, let's look at what kind of content these messages should contain.

First re-engagement message: how's it going?

The first re-engagement message should be one that re-establishes a relationship with the recipient. Our friends at Email On Acid found a good one from L.L.Bean, for example.

Second re-engagement message: you're going to miss out on...

The second message should be one in which you once again remind the recipient of all the great content, offers, news, etc. that you provide in your email communication, and then indicate that - unless you hear from them - you will stop emailing them.

Third re-engagement message: sorry to see you go!

The third re-engagement email (i.e. the ultimatum email) is actually a notification of the recipient having been unsubscribed. However, it represents a final opportunity for you to try to convince them to come back by subscribing again!

In MailUp this third message is the Email to inactive recipients that can be found under Settings > List settings > Notifications

Step 3: Execute the campaign

MailUp gives you access to flexible tools to execute a re-engagement campaign.

Sending the first two messages

You can send the first two messages of the campaign:

• manually by selecting the message that you wish to send and using one of the filters that you have set up to locate inactive recipients on the Choose recipients page when setting up your mailing
• automatically using triggered messages

The best way to go is to execute the campaign automatically, using triggered messages. This means that re-engagement messages will be sent over time, as recipients become inactive.

Let's see how.

1. Create a new triggered message
2. Give it a descriptive name (e.g. "Re-engagement campaign | Message 1")
3. Set it to run every day and set the event trigger as a match on the first Activity filter that you had set up (e.g. in this example, No click or open in the last 180 days)
4. In the Action tab, select the first re-engagement message that you prepared for the campaign, enter From name, From email, etc. and save the triggered message
5. Use the simulation feature to see how many recipients would be a match if the triggered message were executed right then
6. If everything looks good, enable the triggered message
7. Repeat the same steps to create the second triggered message of the campaign, making sure to select the second Activity filter and the second message prepared for the campaign

Sending the third message (and unsubscribing)

The third message is a special one in that it automatically triggers a change of subscription status. For this reason, it is handled separately in MailUp by using the Inactive recipients management area of the Settings > List settings > Preferences page. See managing inactive recipients for details on the settings found on that page. This is an important feature as it allows you to gradually remove from your list recipients that you have not been able to re-engage.

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 

Step 4: Evaluate your re-engagement campaign

Did it work? Re-engaging inactive recipients is not an easy task. Typically, between 5-15% recipients re-engage and remain in your mailing list.

Re-engagement campaigns are a hot topic and good content is getting written all the time. Do a search for re-engagement campaign and you will find plenty of updated content.