The holidays are a great time of year for email marketers to send compelling messages to their subscribers. However, there is also a higher volume of email being sent, which can make it more difficult to get good engagement rates from your subscribers. Here are some tips to help you improve your sender reputation and increase subscriber engagement.
Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers
When you have a group of subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked a message from you in awhile, it’s probably time to remind them of your value through a re-engagement strategy. Here are some tips to re-engage your existing subscribers.
Find the Inactive Subscribers
For your first step, segment your lists into active and inactive subscribers. Use Critical Impact’s dynamic lists to find the subscribers who haven’t opened a message from you in the past year, or who haven’t clicked on a specific category of link.
Create a Re-Engagement Strategy
Depending on your industry, you’ll need to determine the best way to re-engage these inactive subscribers. Seek to understand and mitigate the reasons they have stopped reading your emails.
- Change the Sending Frequency
Take a moment to review how often you’ve been sending messages to these subscribers. They may be feeling burnt out from hearing from you too often. If so, you may want to suppress inactive subscribers from your main mailing list for some of your sends to decrease how many emails they’re receiving from you.
- Offer Helpful Content
If you saw subscribers sign up to receive access to articles, but they never clicked the link to view the resource, then send them a quick informational message or video explaining how to access and use the resources. Help make it easier for them to access the information they want to see.
Test and Review the Results
After testing out these helpful tips, take some time to review the statistics from the re-engagement sends. See which type of message and targeting gave you the best results, and where you can improve.
Target Engaged Subscribers
After attempting to re-engage your inactive subscribers, it’s time to target just your most active, engaged subscribers. You can include those who interacted with your re-engagement emails as well as those who commonly open/click your regular mailings. Not only will this help improve your sender reputation, but it will also help your engagement rates and inbox placement.
Create a List of Engaged Subscribers
Use Critical Impact’s dynamic lists tool to find subscribers who have recently opened a message from you, or who signed up within the past 30 days as a new subscriber. By sending the majority of your messages to this focused list, your sender reputation will improve. For example, domains will see that the majority of recipients at their domain commonly open/click messages sent from you. This means that they will be more likely to place future messages from you in the inbox.
Create Targeted Segments and Personalized Message Content
Target your subscribers with personalized messages to their location, interest, past purchases, etc. Use this information to create personalized subject lines, send from assigned sales representatives, or include articles of interest. Critical Impact’s dynamic content tool helps you send one message to your list with tailored content to the subscriber’s interests. By sending messages with personalized content, you greatly increase the likelihood of someone opening and clicking your message.
We hope these techniques will help energize your subscriber engagement for the holidays!