On average, close to 22.5% of your email subscribers will go inactive each year. While that’s frustrating for any marketing team to think about, the reality is that those subscribers may not be lost forever. Instead of simply writing these inactive subscribers off as lost causes, why not send a win-back or re-engagement campaign?
What does it mean to re-engage my email subscribers?
Re-engaging your email subscribers is simply the act of bringing them from inactive status to engaged, meaning that they’re opening and engaging with your campaign.
You’ve worked so hard building the email list that you currently have, so simply writing off a subscriber as inactive without trying to win them back is simply poor practice.
How do I re-engage my email subscribers?
Re-engaging your email subscribers isn’t as difficult as you may think. Simply following a few steps can mean the difference between keeping a valued subscriber or losing them.
1. Identify inactive subscribers.
You must clearly identify what an inactive subscriber is. It’ll be different for each business because it comes down to how often you’re sending out content.
If you’re only sending out a quarterly newsletter and a subscriber misses the second and fourth, then can you consider that inactive? However, if you’re sending out a weekly newsletter and a reader has missed out on three of the four, then maybe “inactive” is an appropriate tag.
Need help deciphering who’s inactive and who isn’t? Most email service providers, including Campaign Monitor, allow their users to do this by creating list segmentation. By defining a segment as “inactive,” you can instantly see who falls into your inactive category and move forward from there.
2. Understand why they disengaged.
Many of your inactive subscribers simply disengage because they felt they weren’t receiving relevant, interesting content. One way to re-engage your email list is to send out a campaign asking them to update their subscription preferences. This allows you to truly customize their experience and keep them more engaged with your content moving forward.
Source: Really Good Emails
3. Give them a good reason to want to return.
A great way to re-engage your email subscribers is to offer them an incentive to do so. With 72% of people preferring to receive promotional content through email, why not offer up a 10% off their next purchase? A little promotional offer can go a long way in getting your readers to re-engage.
How do I measure my re-engagement efforts?
Measuring the success of your re-engagement effort comes down to monitoring a handful of key metrics. Some email clients offer up engagement details to their users, while others simply supply users with KPIs. Either way, make sure you’re gauging metrics like open and click-through rates for that segment. These inactive subscribers need to be measured differently from your larger list.
Does re-engaging my email subscribers really matter?
When it comes to your email list hygiene, re-engaging your email subscribers list absolutely does matter. To maintain your email list’s health, you must prune it and let go of inactive subscribers. However, that doesn’t mean you have to cut them loose just yet.
It costs 5x as much to acquire a new customer as it does to re-engage an inactive one.
Instead, run a re-engagement campaign and give the subscriber ample opportunity to become active again. If they do, then you’ve just improved the ROI you’ll see from your list.
What now?
Now that you know the basics of re-engaging your email subscribers, why not take a look at an example that we found rather impressive by Panic? Once you’ve done that, keep reading to get some more ideas on why re-engagement is essential and how you can go about it.