List Churn
There are two challenges every marketer faces about their email audience: 1) part of your subscribers will disengage with your content and 2) over time, those uninterested subscribers will completely churn. While it can be frustrating to see part of your audience start to slip away, there are some marketing strategies you can explore to recapture their interest or, at the very least, improve your email's deliverability.
Identify your disengaged subscribers
How you define disengaged subscribers depends on several factors, such as your typical send frequency, business type, or list size. But ultimately, a subscriber is churning when they haven't opened or clicked on your emails over an extended period of time. We know that email engagement makes a positive impact on your email's deliverability, so you want to keep track of subscribers who could hurt your sender reputation. By segmenting your audience with action clauses, you can easily pinpoint your churned subscribers:
Note: In addition to evaluating behavior over time, you should also consider excluding more recent subscribers who haven't been a part of your audience long enough for you to gauge their interest. We suggest adding a 2nd clause to your segment to evaluate the join date to the account.
Re-Engage your churned audience with automation
Now that you've identified your churned subscribers, you may be tempted to immediately remove or unsubscribe them from your audience. While ultimately you may decide to remove the majority, a few subscribers may still re-engage. Email automation (available on Delivra's professional and enterprise plans), lets you easily set up a cadence of campaigns targeting your churned audience in an effort to reconnect with them. Delivra's automation dashboard offers standard automation templates, including re-engagement, that provide you a default cadence for your campaigns. Simply drop in your mailings and choose your flag events to filter out the audiences who engage and those that do not.
Re-engagement Content Examples
- We've Missed You This email lets your audience know that they're still a part of your list and you care about them. It's also a nice time to highlight some updates or developments they may have missed since they started to churn.
- Preference Center Sharing your email preference center allows your churned audience to inform you of their interests and will help you deliver content that is relevant to them. Perhaps you have updated your categories since they first subscribed and this is a good chance to spark their interest.
- Discount Offer If possible, offering a limited-time discount or incentive to take action could lead to new purchases and a rekindled interest in your brand. One small transaction could lead to multiple new purchases over time. source: reallygoodemails.com
What to do after Re-Engagement
After trying any or all of these re-engagement strategies, you're bound to have part of your audience remain uninterested. At this point they are highly unlikely to respond to any future emails you send and you can confidently let them go. In your re-engagement automation, you can include Update Field steps to change data or add subscribers to a category to effortlessly capture which subscribers engaged or which made it through your automation without interacting at all. From there, simply segment and export this part of your audience and re-import them either as unsubscribed or expired status in your account.
Wrap Up
Though it's frustrating to see portions of your audience slip away, Delivra offers a complete set of tools to face this challenge and a chance to turn some of your churned subscribers into long-term, engaged customers. Your audience may respond to these different automation strategies differently, so mix it up to see what yields the most positive engagement. We recommend running a re-engagement campaign at least once a year, so you will have several opportunities to test strategies and win back your subscribers.
