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How to Use a Re-Engagement Email Sequence to Maintain a Quality Email List

Your email list is a valuable tool for marketing your business. Getting people on your list is a great way to build rapport with a potential customer, share valuable insights and information that solves a problem, and turn them into clients or customers. However, a lot of entrepreneurs are enthralled with growing their list that their list eventually becomes filled with people who are not even interested in what they have to say. Your email list should be filled with quality potential clients. This helps you in three ways – saves you money (if your email marketing provider charges by the number of subscribers), builds your email marketing reputation with internet service providers (ISP) like Google, Yahoo, and Outlook, and email marketing providers like Flodesk, Mailchimp, and Convertkit, and provides you with an accurate picture of how well your email campaigns are doing. Sending a re-engagement email sequence can help ensure you have a quality email list.

Most email marketing providers help clean up your list by removing hard bounces and flagging soft bounces. Hard bounces are email addresses that have a permanent deliverability problem like an invalid email address. There is absolutely no chance it would get delivered and should be removed immediately. Soft bounces are a temporary delivery problem like a full email box or an email server temporarily down. While these get flagged by most email marketing providers, they are still okay to keep on your list and attempt to redeliver in the future. Ensuring your email marketing provider does these two tasks for you is a great start to keeping your list quality and clean.

 

When you send emails using an email marketing service, you are building a “reputation” of your email address. This reputation tells internet service providers that you are not spamming, that people like your content, and want to see it, and helps get your emails delivered to their inbox – your “deliverability”. Building and maintaining your reputation takes some work. Not only should you be sending emails regularly (at least once a month but more likely once a week (click here to read my blog on how far apart to send emails), but you also need to ensure that the people on your email list like your content and are “engaged”.

How do you determine who to send a re-engagement email to?

First, log into your email marketing provider and view your list of subscribers. Use the filters to search for people on your list who have not opened an email within the last 90 days. At this point, you can do one of two things – you can remove these people from your list or (this is my suggestion) send them a re-engagement email.

A re-engagement email is a sequence of emails sent to past customers to “win them back” after they have stopped interacting with a brand over a specified length of time.

Sending a re-engagement email sequence allows you to give subscribers the opportunity to re-engage with your content and remain on your list. To do this, you will want to send an email to only those people who have not opened an email in the last 90 days. This email subject should be straightforward (as with all subject lines) and say something like “It’s been a while!” or “We Want You Back!”. If you sell a product a good re-engagement subject line is “We’ve missed you! Here’s 15% off everything!”. In this email, fulfill your promise by giving them a coupon code for a discount on your product. For service-based companies, the email can say something like “It’s been a while since you’ve opened our emails. We want to make sure we are sending you relative, valuable content that you WANT to read. Click here (use a button) if you want to continue to receive our emails.” Then anyone that’s opened and clicked the link, will be able to stay on your email. A good practice is to redirect them to a thank you page once they click the button. By doing this re-engagement email, you will be able to determine who opened the email and clicked the link. Those that did not, can safely be removed from your list after a little while (I’d say give them 45 days to respond/take action). 

Here's a great example of a re-engagement email from Netflix: 

I know I know, removing people from your list that you’ve worked so hard to build?! What?!

It’s best that you do this to ensure that your open rates and email statistics give you the clearest and accurate depiction of how your emails are doing. If you have people on your list that are constantly deleting your emails, you are not doing yourself a favor in multiple ways. You could be wasting money by paying for that subscriber to stay on your list (depending on your email marketing service, most charge by list size). Your statistics will be diluted and not give you a clear picture of how well your emails really are doing. And your reputation with internet service providers will be getting hurt because their algorithms are telling them that people do not like your content so this will cause them to end up in spam most of the time. Who wants that? In the end, cleaning up your list of un-engaged subscribers or old customers that no longer want your services is a win-win for both you and the subscriber!

Want help writing your re-engagement email sequence? Book a discovery call with me today to see how I can help you!

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I'm Amilia

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