The Premise of A Re-Engagement Campaign
The idea is to identify contacts that are not engaging in your contact (in terms of not opening and/or clicking) and move them to a different contact list where they are sent content that is designed to wake them up and get them re-engaged.
This is becoming an industry best practice for several reasons. First there is the obvious benefit that there are costs associated with sending emails and if you remove inactive subscribers it can save you money. Second, while there is some debate in the industry, many email experts agree that keeping contacts on your list that don’t open your emails is likely to harm your sender reputation and lower your deliverability to the inbox. Third, sometimes contacts just stop paying attention to our content. It takes a different type of email subject or the lack of emails to wake them up to the fact that you the sender still exist.
How to Salvage the Contact
Once the contact has been moved from the primary contact list to an “un-engaged” list the best practice is to send them a short number of auto-responders that are most likely to wake them up from inactivity. The first two of these may have subject lines like, “Knock Knock Anyone There?” or “Is This Still Your Email Address?” or “You Aren’t Opening Our Emails Anymore.”
Another strategy is to send these inactive contacts a survey that they can take to hopefully clarify what type of content they want to receive.
Once the contact opens one of these re-engagement emails or clicks on an indicative link in one of the re-engagement emails they should be moved back to the primary contact list or to a “re-engaged” contact list where perhaps you are a little more careful about the frequency of email being sent to these re-engaged contacts.
How to Configure and Run in Interspire Email Marketer
Out of the box the stock version of Interspire Email Marketer cannot automatically identify contacts that are inactive on a list and move them to a new list. IEM also cannot by default set a trigger that can run based on an autoresponder being opened or a link being clicked in an autoresponder. With a few custom addons however you can implement this.
First you need our Re-Engagement Addon. This addon will allow you to identify contacts that are not active (opening and/or clicking) and move or copy them to a different list.
Second, you need our Advanced Triggers Addon. This addon will allow you to set a trigger that will run when a link in an autoresponder is clicked or when an autoresponder is opened and then move or copy the contact to the original list or a new contact list.