How to run a re-engagement campaign?

Hi Veronica,

This is actually one of my favorite topics! This answer is a bit broader than your question, but I normally break down re-engagement into three steps:

1) Define "unengaged." This term will be different for every company. Do you just want to look at email behavior? Does site or purchase behavior count? I normally divorce the two, personally, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right path for your company. I do it because although you have an email address for someone, it doesn't mean it's the right or best one for the account that's taking actions on the site. Someone could have easily signed up with a bad email address or an email address they don't check. Whether you divorce the two or not, then think about timeline in relation to your customer and customer lifecycles. Is 6 months of inactivity enough? 12 months? I know a major daily deal site that set 3 months as their mark, which made sense for them because they emailed every single day.

2) Send your re-engagement campaign(s). For this, I recommend the concept of "disrupting yourself." Subscribers haven't been responding to what you've been sending, so send something else! I've actually found that a plain text email from Support (or someone in a similar role) works well. I used to send a re-engagement email from a Support manager, which essentially was positioned as a "check-in" and asked the subscriber to click one of 4 or so options as to why they haven't been opening emails.

As part of that, there was a sentence after the 4 options that said something like, "Of course, you can always unsubscribe at any time as well" with "unsubscribe" as a link. Surprisingly enough, the most frequently clicked link in all of the 4 options + the unsubscribe option was "I like the emails but have been busy; keep sending them!"

Another component of this is thinking about when to send the re-engagement campaign. For my last major re-engagement strategy, I decided that 4 months of no email activity deemed someone "inactive" for my brand. My most successful re-engagement email was when I would put the subscriber on "pause" for a month after 4 months of inactivity and send them nothing during that month, then send them a re-engagement email. Perhaps the subscriber has grown numb to seeing your brand repeatedly in their inbox? There is a certain amount of fatigue that can set in there, so I've found that giving subscribers a break before trying to re-engage them works well.

3) The unsubscribe part. The point of re-engagement, of course, is to either wake up zombie subscribers, or say goodbye to them. My subscribers in my last re-engagement campaign had 3 paths to go down as part of re-engagement:

- They re-engaged, and therefore stayed on my regular sending list.
- They unsubscribed from the re-engagement email and were off the list.
- They didn't open or click the re-engagement email.

If someone didn't open or didn't click my re-engagement email, I didn't unsubscribe (technically speaking) them, but I would just take them off my regular sending list. I didn't want to technically unsubscribe them because they could always open that re-engagement email later on, or open any older emails later on...and if they did, they would automatically go back into my regular send list as part of a daily filter I ran in my ESP each morning.

Does that all help/make sense? Happy to discuss further!