Intro
Let’s assume you have been doing email marketing campaigns for a while and you always practice double opt-in when it comes to your email list. As time goes by, you might notice that your bounce rate is gradually increasing. If you’re using an Email Service Provider (bulk email sending provider), you might also see your opens and clicks are decreasing.
This is called mailing list aging. The moment you have added an email address to your mailing list via double opt-in, it starts to age. After a few months, you should perform a re-engagement campaign as those email addresses are considered stale and it is risky to send them email marketing contents.
A re-engagement campaign involves reaching out to those subscribers to see if they are still interested in receiving your email content. If the reply is negative or they ignore the re-engagement email, it is best to unsubscribe them from your mailing list.
Importance of re-engagement campaign
There are many reasons while you should conduct frequent re-engagement campaigns:
- Subscribers have changed their email address or their email address no longer exists.
- Subscribers haven’t checked their mailbox in a long time and their email address have been converted into spam trap by their email provider.
- Subscribers could have forgotten that they did sign up for your mailings so might treat your emails as spam.
- Gives subscribers a chance to unsubscribe instead of marking your emails as spam.
Performing a re-engagement campaign
- Select your target group of subscribers. You may want to select those inactive subscribers and those emails above a certain age (e.g. 6 months).
- Ideally, your email content should be interesting and eye-catching so as to attract the attention of your target subscribers.
- Group your campaign into batches of subscribers so that you won’t be flagged as a spammer for sending out large quantities of emails at once.
- After sending out the re-engagement emails, you should be prepared for an increase in unsubscribes.
- After a few weeks, those subscribers that ignored the re-engagement emails should be unsubscribed from your list.