5 Things to Consider in a Subscriber Reengagement Campaign

There are a few things you can count on in life … taxes … death … and, if you are an email marketer, unengaged subscribers. The fact is your subscriber base is constantly changing. People subscribe, others unsubscribe. Some subscribers are engaged and open your emails regularly. And some, well, some just languish there.

Of course it is your job as an email marketer to continually clean your list and regularly purge your “dead” email addresses. But, there’s an important and potentially profitable step to take before you press the delete button:  the reengagement campaign.

A successful reengagement campaign can wake up sleeping subscribers and bring them back into the fold with a relevant and enticing offer. Here are five steps you can take when executing your reengagement campaign:

Review Your Lists: 

When you sit down to plan your reengagement campaign, the first step is to set parameters. Decide what unengaged subscribers mean to you – whether that means not opening your emails for X amount of months or X number of emails received. (There is also the reengagement campaign for lapsed buyers – but we’ll tackle that in another article.) You will need to have a firm grasp on what base you are targeting so you can determine your strategy.

The Importance of an Offer:

The offer you decide on for your reengagement campaign must be exciting! After all, these people have been receiving emails from you for quite a while and don’t appear to be overly interested. That’s okay. An interesting subject line (don’t worry – it’s the next step!) and a click-worthy offer are all you may need to wake that subscriber up.

Since these are the folks that aren’t opening your emails, you may want to lead with your offer – especially if you can swing an exponentially bigger discount than usual.  For example, “65% off – 24 Hours Only” may catch these subscribers’ eyes. However, if you can’t dig super deep for this campaign and the discount isn’t that exciting all on its own, you may want to rely on an interesting subject line to pique their interest.

Subject Line Science:

Subject lines are crucial to the success of any email campaign and especially important to a reengagement campaign. Again, these people have not been viewing your emails, so your main goal of this campaign is to get them to open that message! A good way to determine your subject line is through testing. Test a subject line that contains the offer against a subject line that is more “mysterious.” See what does better and adjust accordingly.

Don’t Be Shy:

Let’s face it – you probably were already hitting these folks pretty hard with your email messaging. Now is not the time to send one email, receive no response and give up. Three emails per reengagement campaign is a good place to start. Make sure these efforts are timed appropriately – stagger timing of deployments to be sure you are reaching people. If you are prepared to purge non-responders from your list entirely following this campaign, you may want to offer an opt-out option in your final message’s subject line.

Learn – and Grow:

A key takeaway to reengagement campaigns is to learn from the efforts – and build on that knowledge. Don’t fall back into the same routines that caused the subscriber fatigue and disengagement. Don’t batch and blast. Time your messages for maximum impact. And, continue to test all elements of your campaigns.

And, after the campaign is done, be sure to clean your list accordingly. There’s no point in sending emails to people who have continually failed to open emails for months or even years. That’s just wasting your budget.

On the other hand, if you can get those subscribers to wake up and start opening your emails, that’s great! But, don’t stop there. Keep your offers enticing, content fresh and designs interesting. Include a link in your emails for further customer service assistance and feedback – people like opportunities to continue a conversation and voice their opinions.

Have you executed a reengagement campaign recently? What were your results? Did you test your subject lines? Leave a comment and let us know.