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Marketing is a competition for people's attention. And that's a big challenge because you have to deal with a lot of noise. Honestly, noise is just marketers' way of describing other messages and consumer distractions. If you can get subscribers and keep them engaged, email remains one of the most reliable channels to reach and engage your target audience. Of course, to gain that same valuable attention, the trick is to not become the noise yourself.
Your prospect is bombarded with marketing messages everywhere they go, so generating quality small and medium-sized business leads and keeping them engaged is difficult to begin with. The even harsher truth is that many well-meaning, dedicated small and medium-sized marketers are working with email lists where an average of 60% of subscribers are inactive—or, to use the relevant industry term, “dead.” These contacts haven’t opened, clicked, or responded to an email sent in recent memory. Typically, the benchmark is six months or more.
Armed with this knowledge, SMB marketers can make the decision not to ignore the inactive emails and just keep sending them, even if it carries the risk of reduced deliverability, but instead to re-engage with the prospects and try to re-establish the relationship with them.
Free resource
Maximizing Deliverability: A Tactical Guide to List Management for Google and Yahoo's Email Policy Update
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Why it is worth getting involved again
We're talking about a large portion of the email list here. Inactive subscribers on your list haven't unsubscribed. That means they're still part of your (addressable) audience. They already like you and want to hear about your brand. At some point they opted in, which means they're on your good side – we're not talking about cold calling here. You want to keep your email subscribers for more than a day.
Although the rule of thumb in email marketing has so far been to proactively “delete” inactive subscribers so as not to impact the deliverability of your messages and teach ISPs to recognize you as spam, it’s worth making an attempt to re-engage before deleting.
Ultimately, the ROI of a reactivation email marketing campaign is hard to ignore. The dollars and cents tell you to try re-engagement before removing inactive subscribers from your list.
Don't take your existing contacts for granted. Re-engaging them can improve the quality of your list, increase conversion rates, and maintain good list hygiene.
Free resource
The Double Engagement Playbook: How two emails lead to maximum engagement
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Re-engagement versus recovery
Before we formulate your re-engagement strategy by breaking churn down into “reason groups,” it's important to distinguish a “re-engagement” message from a “win-back” message. The purpose of a re-engagement email is to convince a lapsed subscriber to show interest in your brand again, while a win-back email is designed to compel a specific purchase after that purchase seems lost, such as when someone cancels their subscription.
The difference between the two is essential because you are not trying to convince a customer to make a purchase. Your goal is to get your prospect interested in your messages and re-establish a long-term relationship with your brand.
Why has your subscriber count stagnated?
First, it's good to identify the different reasons for churn to formulate your re-engagement strategy. Knowing the reasons will help you adjust your email marketing strategy. Here are the most likely causes of increased churn.
1. Poor quality content: If your emails aren't delivering relevant, valuable content that your audience could really benefit from, it's no wonder your subscribers aren't opening your messages anymore. If you find out that this is the main reason for the massive audience churn, you'll have to start all over again. You need to give your email subscribers some love if you want something in return.
2. Email Overload: Have you sent too many emails? Subscribers have limited attention spans, so they prioritize. If you overload them, your messages will likely end up in your subscriber's “I'll read this tomorrow” pile… and tomorrow never comes.
One way to prevent overloading in combination with re-engagement is to provide (only once) the opportunity to reduce the frequency.
3. They weren't interested to begin with: Maybe you had the best intentions to offer an expertly marketed opt-in to increase your subscriber base, but it ultimately didn't bring in any quality leads. If the free offer was “too good,” you may have inadvertently attracted people who weren't interested in your brand but simply wanted the free offer. To keep track of the quality of your subscriptions, always “Save” your subscription name in the customer profile. This will help you avoid investing in a large but uninterested free offer/giveaway group that will dilute your subscriber list in the future.
4. You broke a promise (or several): Clickbait titles that don't deliver on their promises, a super useful-looking download that turns out to be nothing more than blatant advertising… broken promises jeopardize your subscribers' trust in your brand and that leads to churn.
Measure your pulse
It's important to find out how disengaged your subscriber really is. Has this person just turned away from your email marketing campaigns or from your other touchpoints as well? Because there are different levels of “dead,” each of which rightly requires its own re-engagement strategy. You need to divide your dead subscribers into groups based on the channels they turned away from.
- Active but not engaged: This person doesn't open your emails but continues to visit your website and store and liked one of your Facebook posts last week. It will be relatively easy to re-engage them.
- Almost dead: Not only is this person not opening your emails, they are not visiting your website or interacting through other channels. They made a purchase this year, but you haven't heard from them since. It's going to be hard, hard, hard to win them back.
- Go through his clothes and look for spare change: This person is completely disinterested. He doesn't open your emails, doesn't engage with your brand, and has never purchased anything. The only interaction you've ever seen is the email subscription, but that's it. You may never be able to win him back because he probably wasn't interested to begin with.
How to reactivate
If someone has simply unsubscribed from your emails but is still engaging with your brand through alternative channels, it's best to reach out to them directly via reactivation email and ask them to update their preferences. Perhaps the emails they've received from you so far haven't been properly personalized, or simply weren't valuable or engaging. Rework your emails to make them more valuable, and reach out. Not once. Not twice. Try at least three times before you turn down that still-valuable contact.
However, if someone has abandoned most or all of your channels (email, social, website), you need to prove your value again. You can send an offer to entice the recipient, or something that hits the mark, such as a message clearly stating that you haven't seen this person in a while and that you'd like to reestablish the relationship.
Highlight all the news, features, sales and buzz you've generated over the past few months, and maybe go the extra mile by including recent testimonials to prove your value.
Yes, there are some subscribers you need to delete from the list. If you find yourself rummaging through their clothes for change, it's time to delete them. If they've never purchased anything or interacted with your brand on any channel, you can safely delete them from your subscriber list.
Free resource
Unlock engagement: Celebrate subscriber milestones to build lasting connections
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Don’t let the contact wither away
If you notice “dead” weight on your subscriber list, resist the temptation to immediately delete users who are no longer interested. First, re-engage with them in an intelligent way.
Remember, your goal here is not to get the disinterested subscriber to buy right from the first email, but it's also not your goal to get them to open just that one email. What you really want is for your prospects to start interacting with you again and ultimately making regular purchases. Re-engaging your contacts is a worthwhile effort!
Biography of the author:
by Benchmark Team
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
