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Introducing Pre-Built Engagement Segments in Campaign Monitor
This post was originally published in January 2019, updated in August 2019.
No matter which industry you work in or how large your subscriber list is, there’s one common question among all email marketers: how do I effectively measure subscriber engagement? Of course, the most engaged subscribers are the most loyal to your brand and they’re often easier to identify by how often they open and click. But what about subscribers who are showing a diminishing interaction with your emails?
Unengaged and dormant subscribers can cost you more money and dilute the success of your email programs. Our challenge was to build a tool to make it easy for marketers to identify the most valuable segments of their subscribers, help them create a solid strategy around re-engagement, and as a result, deliver more effective content that reinvigorates interest in your brand and improves your overall email ROI.
Get the most out of your subscribers with pre-built engagement segments.
Engagement tools in your Campaign Monitor account help you identify and re-engage those subscribers that may have fallen off the radar.
Using engagement segments, you have access to six pre-built segments which are based on your subscribers’ level of engagement with your emails. Now, you’ve got a scalable and reliable way to calculate engagement, and more importantly, automatically trigger relevant and timely content right to your subscribers.
How engagement segments work
We’ve built a brand new system to help you identify your subscribers based on their levels of engagement, from active to completely inactive.
Engagement segments calculate six levels of engagement and organize these levels automatically into their own pre-built segments right within your account. For customers on the Premier plan, you’ll see the six segments in your lists based on open and click frequency. These segments include:
| Active | Last opened or clicked in past 30 days. |
| Engaged | Last opened or clicked between 30 and 90 days ago. |
| Unengaged | Last opened or clicked between 90 and 180 days ago. |
| Dormant | Last opened or clicked between 180 days and 12 months ago. |
| Zombies | Last opened or clicked more than 12 months ago. |
| Ghosts | Never opened or clicked any email, 12 months or more since the first email was sent. |
All of the engagement segments’ details and criteria are predefined, and you can use them just like other segments including to automatically trigger content and emails.
The Active segment updates in real time, while the other segments refresh every 24 hours. Engagement segments do not calculate subscribers who have recently signed up, but have yet to engage.
Take this a step further—you can now use this engagement data when building your own custom segments. This allows you to get even more targeted in who you send to. For example, create a segment of your Dormant subscribers in a specific location to make your re-engagement campaign as meaningful and targeted as possible.
Learn more about building your own segments here.
Easily identify your most engaged subscribers.
To focus in even more on the subscribers that are most loyal to your brand, you can combine this engagement data with other pieces of information you know about your subscribers. For example, create a segment of ‘Active’ subscribers who have given you a high NPS rating to target just your most engaged advocates.
The subscribers marked Active are your most loyal subscribers—they recently opened, clicked, and engaged with your brand. Consider them your VIPs. With engagement segments, it’s never been easier to identify this critical group of your most active subscribers and thank them for being such valuable customers.
Think rewards programs, thank you notes for repeat purchases, special incentives in exchange for their loyalty, etc. You can even offer a shout on social media or enter them into a giveaway when they reach a certain loyalty status.
Manage and keep a healthy list.
According to Marketing Sherpa, you’ll see about 22.5% of your list become disengaged every year. This can be extremely frustrating when you’ve worked so hard to grow your subscriber list, but the good news is these relationships aren’t always gone—they could just be on a break.
Engagement segments make it incredibly clear who haven’t been engaging with your emails in a while. Using engagement segments, you can easily see who’s at risk, pause sending (or decrease the frequency of sends to them), and then decide whether or not a re-engagement approach is the best next step.
Win them back using re-engagement templates.
Now that you can see all of these levels of engagement among your subscribers, what’s next? We have three new email templates for you to use in conjunction with these engagement segments to make the most out of your subscriber list.
Whether it’s offering a win-back discount, reminding customers what they love about you, or just an honest “we miss you,” we’ve got you covered. These re-engagement templates are available to all customers now in the email builder.
Wrap up
Engagement segments are available for Campaign Monitor customers on the Premier plan and the re-engagement templates are available for all customers. If you’d like to upgrade to Premier, click the Billing button found in the Settings dropdown in the top-right of your account.
Here at Campaign Monitor, we’re dedicated to building smart solutions to help you drive engagement and loyalty through email marketing. If you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team!
