You may have your hands full keeping your current subscribers engaged. However, if you’re experiencing any inactivity, you’d be wise to create a re-engagement strategy to prevent that inactivity from dragging down your results and metrics.
Re-engagement is not only helpful in removing outliers from your results and metrics, but it’s also beneficial for your bottom line:
It costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than re-engage an inactive one.
Analyze inactive subscribers: who are they and why did they disengage?
To create an effective re-engagement email template, you’ll need to understand as much as possible about your inactive subscribers. To do this, you need to define your inactive segment. Are they subscribers who declined to open your emails for the last two months? Alternatively, are they people who have not clicked a call to action (CTA) in the last six months?
Next, it’s time to analyze why these customers disengaged. For clues, analyze this segment by demographics and behavior. Your customer support records could provide critical insight into why these subscribers disengaged.
Acknowledge the concern and address it.
Your re-engagement strategy will probably consist of a series of emails before you remove the inactive subscriber from your list altogether.
In the first re-engagement email, address the person’s concern. Simply say something like, “We know that you received a product that didn’t work as well as it should,” or, “We know you’ve probably seen poor coverage of our brand in the news.” Next, show them that you understand by expressing empathy. Finally, tell them how you plan to make things right.
If you’ve been unable to pinpoint the reason the subscriber is inactive, consider asking. This will not only help you re-engage these particular customers but may improve your business overall.
Offer an incentive for re-engagement.
Consider offering an incentive for the customer to re-engage. Incentives can include promo codes, unique sale items, or access to gated content.
This email from Jack Wills offers a discount as an incentive for customers to re-engage with the brand.
Carefully consider the tone.
When you create your email template for re-engaging subscribers, tone is key. That’s why you’ll often see humor—or, at least, a light touch—used by brands. Your tone can convey that you respect the recipient’s choice, but you’re hopeful you can give them a good reason to become active again.
How to measure the results of your re-engagement email
Marketing Sherpa found that, on average, a list will have 2.1% of subscribers go inactive every 30 days. Annualized, this means 22.5% of your list will drop off if you do nothing. Use the definition you came up with for an inactive subscriber and then analyze your own brand’s monthly and annual inactive rate. Next, set a monthly goal for improving upon the inactive rate.
Does it really matter?
Re-engaging inactive subscribers absolutely matters for your company’s bottom line. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your business. The analysis you perform before you compose your re-engagement template will also give you critical business insight.
What now?
A great starting point is to segment your subscribers based on inactivity, and then reaching out at certain cadences to those groups. If you’re hoping to do this without the manual segmentation, Campaign Monitor has a feature that automatically analyzes your list based on engagement. We call it Engagement Segments, and you can learn more about it here.