Everyone can agree that most people hate receiving too many emails, especially if they’re not interesting or irrelevant. Without quality and relevant content, subscribers can easily become inactive which means brands need to have re-engagement tactics in place. It’s important to impress upon your audience why they’re not wasting their time opening and reading your emails.

Considering how fast email marketing is changing in the business world, you must have impeccable writing skills and a solid email marketing strategy. For the most part, you need more than random newsletter emails to keep your target audience interested. It all starts with knowing how to identify your inactive subscribers, A/B Testing your content, measuring and understanding the metrics.

The Fine Line Of Re-engaging With Inactive Subscribers

Re-engagement campaigns are often intimidating as you want to encourage people to read and click your content without appearing desperate. Before creating any more content, you need to identify your inactive subscribers and divide them into specific segments. This way you will be able to provide them with content most relevant to their needs or geographic location among other factors.

It’s completely normal to have inactive subscribers who don’t engage with your email campaigns but may still be interested in your brand. The tricky bit is knowing how to segment your audience and identifying the type of content that will appeal to them more. Let’s take a closer look at a few simple ways you can identify your inactive subscribers.

How To Identify Inactive Subscribers

There are several email marketing tools available with built-in list segmentation and online behaviour tracking. If you are using email marketing software like SharpSpring, MailChimp or Hubspot, identifying and segmenting your least engaged subscribers becomes a little easier.

• Check their recent activity in terms of when they last opened an email, clicked a link, made a purchase or viewed something on your website
• See how they signed up whether it was on a landing page or through a specific lead magnet. Knowing this will help identify why they signed up and what content may appeal to them more
• Look at their purchase history as this opens up the possibilities of giving them unique coupons
• Use the standard segmentation stages for inactive subscribers by dividing them into different lists. Segmentation examples include age, geographic location, online behaviour, gender or any other relevant data you collected

Re-engagement Tactics To Boost Your Brand

Customer engagement and retention is all about quality and making your brand stand out in the crowded digital sphere. This is challenging for many companies at the best of times but it’s not something you can ignore. To help you get started, here are a few re-engagement tactics that could make all the difference.

Automated Email Re-engagement Series

Once you have segmented your audience and identified relevant content, create a series of re-engagement emails. You can send these to inactive subscribers over time but bear in mind GDPR and CAN-SPAM still applies.

With that in mind, make sure your subscribers can easily unsubscribe or opt-out which brings us to another automated process. Use post-send actions to automatically unsubscribe people or move them into a different group once they’ve received the email series. If people on a specific list don’t open any of your re-engagement emails, you can automatically set something up to unsubscribe them.

Helpful article: ‘Re-engage With Subscribers Using Permission Reminders’

Polls And Surveys

Online polls and surveys are exceptionally powerful re-engagement tactics as you often get compelling feedback. Compile a list of questions you need answers to and ask subscribers to complete an online poll or survey. From there, you can send them a free gift or promo code to show your appreciation.

If you asked the right questions, the results could tell you exactly what your inactive subscribers are interested in. You can use this newly collected data to target them with additional campaigns across various channels. Here’s some interesting information on the ‘Do’s and Don’ts Of Online Surveys’

Online Competitions Or Giveaways

Contests, giveaways or raffles can also generate additional interest in your email campaigns. While many brands partner with likeminded companies for a bigger audience reach and budget share, you can also do it on your own. The biggest advantage here is that you control all aspects of the entire process and can make important decisions on the spot.

While your audience might be limited, competitions can help you engage more with your existing client base. For example, people are entered into the draw for following you on different social media channels or by signing up to your email list. A nice touch is to ask followers to post a photo that tags or mentions your brand. At the end of the competition date, you will choose a winner with the best photo.

Promo Codes or Coupons Re-engagement Tactics

In a similar way as a permission reminder email, you can send inactive subscribers an email with a special offer. This can be a 25% discount on their next order or promo code to download your latest e-book. Add a personalised message to the email message stating that it’s been a while since they last visited your website and include any changes or updates that occurred since their last visit.

Product Recommendations

Many successful brands use product recommendations as a way to re-engage with inactive subscribers. Collect data on the purchase behaviour of your subscribers as you will see the pages they visited, products they looked at and purchased.

This is the ideal opportunity to use the data and identify any products you could recommend for each subscriber based on what they bought before. Having this information at your disposal means you can send them an enticing campaign suggesting products they might love.

Use A/B Testing For Best Results

Once you’ve selected your preferred re-engagement tactics, consider running A/B tests before activating your campaigns. Most email and marketing automation tools today have this functionality as it’s vital for campaign success. A/B testing is done for various elements from subject lines, images, calls-to-action or a selection of special offers. In your campaign, you may want to see which offer gets the most engagement between a 25% discount on their next order or free shipping.

Generally, the most successful campaigns will show about 10% of inactive subscribers re-engaging with the brand. Of course, this depends on the size of the target audience and specific sales goals. Good re-engagement campaigns have the potential to make a massive impact on open rates, clicks and conversions.

Final Verdict

Regardless of where you’re current engagement and targeting activities are, always share high-quality, engaging content. Not only does this help improve your brand’s online image but it can also increase conversion rates. For best results, try different content for your segmented audience list and accurately track your metrics.

At the same time, whether it’s through email or on social media, you are essentially having a two-way conversation. Never talk at your audience but rather speak to them and with them. It also doesn’t make a difference if they are repeat customers or not; always address their needs carefully and accurately to ensure that they keep coming back.

For expert digital marketing advice and services across the board, get in touch with WSI eMarketing. We specialise in web development, email marketing, SEO, social media marketing and marketing automation among others.