Re-Engagement Email Campaign: An Effective Way To Increase Conversions

What Is a Re-Engagement Email Campaign?

Launching your own re-engagement email campaign is an easy way to rekindle your relationship with subscribers who have become inactive. 

You might think that the best course of action is to delete them, but a re-engagement email campaign might be a better fit.

After all, you’ve been putting a lot of resources into acquiring subscribers, so let’s give them one last chance to re-engage before removing them for good.

When it comes to re-engagement email campaigns, you can take two approaches:

• Send one email.

• Set up an entire re-engagement sequence.

“What is a re-engage email sequence?” you might ask.

It’s a series of emails that are sent in a specific sequence to re-engage your subscribers.

Whether or not you should send one re-engagement email or set up an entire sequence depends on your business model.

If you’re selling your products, running an entire re-engagement sequence makes a ton of sense because the Lifetime Value (LTV) of every subscriber is huge.

But if the main way you monetize is with advertising, sending one email should be enough.
Check out this video to understand how to create a re-engagement campaign on beehiiv

The Importance of Re-Engaging Inactive Subscribers

The cost of getting new subscribers is going up.

Right now, you can get subscribers in two ways:

• Organic content

• Paid advertising

While with organic content, you technically get new subs for free, you still need to produce that organic content, which could be time-consuming.

With paid advertising, you’re straight up paying for subscribers, so the costs are easier to figure out.

Since you’ve spent all that time, energy, and money on getting new subs, removing them without trying to re-engage would be a waste.

That’s why it is important to frequently re-engage inactive subscribers.

What Constitutes a Re-Engagement Email Campaign?

A re-engagement email campaign involves sending a series of emails in a sequence, targeted at inactive people.

These emails should be different from your regular email content, as these subscribers have shown that they aren’t interested in your regular emails.

So here comes the question - how do you run a re-engagement campaign?

We have to start with the campaign’s goal -- turning your inactive subscribers into active readers and buyers.

Therefore, the campaign has to be centered around focusing on their interests and creating content that’s appealing to them.

Here are the key steps you need to take when running a re-engagement campaign:

• Segment your list: This will help you filter out and find out who your most inactive subscribers are.

• Find extra data points that show you commonalities: Look for a common acquisition source, the last email they clicked, and so on.

• Figure out the best approach for the campaign: Decide whether you need to send one email or create an entire sequence.

• Launch your re-engagement campaign: Create content that would interest your inactive subscribers.

• Watch the key metrics and improve over time: Let’s talk about the key metrics you need to take into account.

Key Metrics To Measure Re-Engagement

The metrics you’re tracking in your re-engagement campaign aren’t that different from the metrics you track with your regular email campaigns.

With your re-engagement campaign, you need to pay attention to:

• Your open rate to see how many people opened your emails

• Your click-through rate to see how many people are clicking on your offer

• Your unsubscribe rate to see how many folks want to unsubscribe from your list

• Your re-engagement rate to see how many people are re-engaged

Track these numbers and use them to improve your efforts.

Planning Your Re-Engagement Email Strategy

Now, it’s time to plan your re-engagement email strategy.

This plan should include:

• Your goal

• The key metrics you need to track

• Your approach (sending one email vs. sending an entire sequence)

• What are you going to include in the emails? Is it special offers, access to new products, discount codes, or something else?

• When are you going to be launching it?

By following these five steps, you can create a comprehensive plan for your re-engagement email strategy.

Identifying Your Inactive Audience Segment

Here comes the segmentation part of the equation called the re-engagement email campaign.

Segmenting your audience will help you see which subscribers are inactive.

Luckily for you, segmenting your audience has never been easier with beehiiv.

Read about how you can create your email segments that will show you which subscribers are inactive, here.

Crafting Effective Re-Engagement Emails

Now that you’re ready, it’s time to craft some effective re-engagement emails.

A solid re-engagement email gets you closer to your goals.

It features these key elements:

• Personalization

• Solid subject lines

• Powerful and engaging content

Let’s go over each one.

Personalization Techniques To Capture Attention

We all get these spammy-looking emails that are addressed to everyone else but not ourselves.

What do you do when you see them?

You unsubscribe and delete them, but they stay with you for a long time. We want to do the opposite with our re-engagement emails.

We don’t want to blast off a message online that looks and feels the same to every reader. 

We want to create emails that feel engaging and speak to one specific person.

Why Trust Me: Tanyo runs an email marketing agency focused on the finance industry. He helps his clients get higher engagement and more sales from their email lists. Tanyo also writes a newsletter on beehiiv called One Story Friday.

So how do we do that?

The first (and easiest) step is to use your prospect’s first name in the first line, so it speaks to them.

That makes the content personal and relevant.

If you can use their name in the subject line, even better.

Now that we are chatting about subject lines…

Compelling Subject Lines To Boost Open Rates

A good subject line makes the difference between an engaging email and an unopened one.

A compelling subject has three characteristics:

• Concise

• Speaks directly to your prospects

• Answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Here are a couple of examples from top beehiiv newsletters:

• Young Money’s - Everything You Can't Predict

• Arnold’s Pump Club - Defending Against Dementia 

And, of course, we can’t forget our own Black Friday promo. (picture below 😂)

Creative Content Ideas for Re-Engagement

Now, this is the most crucial part of your re-engagement campaign.

The people you’re targeting with your re-engagement emails haven’t shown enough interest in your content. You can’t just show up in their inbox with the same content.

You need something else that will appeal to them.

So here are a few content ideas that will keep your juices flowing:

• Ask your inactive subscribers for feedback: Write an email that asks them what type of content and emails they want to see more of, so you can tailor it to them.

• Send them personalized product offers: This will help you see if they’re interested in some of your products.

• Offer special discounts: Nothing engages inactive subscribers like special discounts. Offer them a special discount with a limited-time offer that encourages them to engage.

• Create special content: This would be content that makes it easy for them to engage. It can feature polls, quizzes, or surveys that help you get more data.

• Tell success stories: Maybe your folks have fallen out of love with your story or just straight up forgot that they signed up for your email. 

An excellent way to remind them about why they signed up is to create a few customer success stories with testimonials. 

Now, let’s talk about best practices.

Best Practices for Re-Engagement Campaigns

Re-engagement email campaigns could quickly spiral out of control if you don’t follow best practices.

These include:

• Constant A/B testing of different subject lines, email formats, and re-engagement offers

• Having a clear and consistent message across your emails

Let’s go over these.

Using A/B Testing To Improve Engagement

Most online advice about A/B testing in email marketing is about testing out different subject lines. 

That’s all good, but what if your subject line is a killer and your emails still don’t perform to expectations?

What do you do then?

That’s why we encourage you to split-test your re-engagement formats.

A/B test your email formats and re-engagement offers.

Find the ones that work best and engage subscribers the most.

Then, make them part of your re-engagement campaign.

Balancing Incentives and Clear Messaging

With our re-engagement emails, we want to reward inactive subscribers for engaging with us again.

How do we do that?

By offering a clear upside for them, whether that’s:

• A new offer

• A discount

• A preview of an upcoming offer

Here comes the importance of proper segmentation.

If you’ve done it right, you should have enough data to see which type of messaging and offer would appeal the most to your inactive subscribers.

Follow the Regulations

Re-engaging inactive subscribers is no excuse to not follow the regulations. 

From personal experience, I’ve seen a ton of brands (in the info space specifically) send re-engagement campaigns AFTER I’ve unsubscribed from their emails.

Don’t be like that.

At the bottom of every re-engagement you send, there should be an unsubscribe button that allows people to unsubscribe if they aren’t interested.

I’d go a step further and say that you should actively encourage people to unsubscribe, especially in the re-engagement emails.

That’s because inactive subscribers are a huge drag on your key metrics (open rates, CTRs, conversion rates), so having a list full of inactive subs isn’t worth it.

Analyzing and Optimizing Your Campaign

We have set up all of these tests with one goal in mind – getting some data back.

But not all data is equal.

We don’t want to get that confused.

So here are the key metrics we want to track with our re-engagement email campaign:

• Open rates

• Click-through rates

• Re-engagement rates

• Unsubscriber rates

With these data points, you can start analyzing and optimizing your re-engagement email campaign.

This leads us to interpretation…

Interpreting Campaign Analytics

Every process has a bottleneck, which you can see from the analytics.

Not enough people opening your emails?

Check out the subject lines or your deliverability.

Not enough people clicking on your offers in the emails?

You need to optimize your offer and CTA in the email itself.

Don’t collect data just to see cool-looking analytics charts and boards.

Use these analytics to see your biggest bottlenecks and go from there.

Then, keep tweaking the different elements of your re-engagement campaign until you get the results you want.

Launch Your Re-Engagement Email Campaign Today

You now have all of the information you need to launch your first re-engagement email campaign.

It’s super important that you do this so you can keep your audience engaged and interested in your content and products.

This is your way to win back some subscribers who haven’t been following you lately and turn them into buyers.

So sign up for beehiiv today and tap into those automation and analytics tools to set up your re-engagement campaign.