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. It’s usually easier to re-engage an existing subscriber than to get a brand new subscriber to sign up for your list. So here are 3 steps to re-engage your existing 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.
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.
Take a moment to look at 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 it from your main mailing list for some of your sends – so they only receive one message a week instead of one message each day.
Further target your inactive subscribers by location, interest, past purchases, etc. to see send more personalized messages. Use this information to create personalized subject lines, send from assigned sales representatives, or include articles of interest. Customizing the message content can really help re-engage your subscribers.
Everyone loves a special deal! Offer a discount for services or products. You could also send them a free download of a white-paper. Just give them something that’s not widely available to other people.
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.
As a last resort, you can send a re-engagement message that asks them if they would still like to receive messages from you. You could say something like: “We’re cleaning our mailing list and noticed that you haven’t opened a message from us in a long time. Should we delete you from our lists? If not, click this link and we will keep you on our list.” This is a type of message that should only be sent after you’ve tried other techniques to get subscribers to re-engage.
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.
We hope these techniques help you re-engage subscribers before the holidays!
