Raising Your Audience From The 💀 Dead!

Over time a percentage of your newsletter subscribers will either unsubscribe or become disengaged. Otherwise known as list attrition.

There’s not much you can do for those who unsubscribe, except hope they come back one day and decide to resubscribe to get access to your information. I’ve done this a number of times.

Now for those subscribers who just stopped engaging with your content:

• Subscribers whose focus has been pulled into another direction.

• Your deliverability was down for a while and they fell off your sending segment.

These are the subscribers you can “Raise From The Dead.”

This is known as Reactivation or Re-Engagment.

But first, let’s make sure you have the right sending segments in place.

Sunsetting Your Subscribers

To keep your email engagement and deliverability high you must first ensure to establish a Sunsetting Policy.

If you haven’t read my newsletter on Email Inboxing, I highly recommend you click here to read it now.

Creating a base sending segment will ensure you are only sending to engaged subscribers and automatically sunsetting subscribers with a built-in sunset policy.

For this newsletter you are reading, you can see my base sending segment below.

So subscribers will be sunsetted and stop receiving emails if, they haven’t clicked in the last 90 days, haven’t opened in the last 60 days, or were subscribed over 30 days and haven’t opened or clicked.

NOTE: The OR condition for all these filters, tells the system to send to any subscriber who meets any of the criteria provided.

Who We Should Try And Reactivate?

Reactivating (raising from the dead) is not the same as activating a subscriber for the first time.

You should only try and reactivate subscribers who were previously engaged with your list which means they have opened and clicked on a previous email.

Trying to send to really old subscribers who have never engaged with your content can open up a whole new can of worms you don’t want to be a part of.

You can see an entire breakdown here of what can happen with old non-engaged data.

Re-Activation Segment

Your re-activation segment should include subscribers who have engaged with your emails in the past, but have not engaged during a specific time period.

Above you will see the segment we have set up for Re-activation on one of our daily newsletters.

Notice the “AND” condition as all of the filters must be valid for the subscriber to be part of this segment.

In lamens terms our Re-activation segment consists of subscribers who have NOT engaged with our newsletter in the last 60 days, but have engaged with our newsletter in the past year.

How Often To Send A Reactivation Email

The frequency of a reactivation email can vary, based on the normal frequency of sends to your list and it’s standard engagement metrics.

• For a newsletter that is sending daily you may send a Reactivation email once per month.

• For a newsletter that is sent once a week, you may send the reactivation email once every 3 months.

TIP: I’ve found that Friday is a great day to send reactivation emails if you send a daily newsletter as complaints and unsubscribes have consistently been lower on this day.

Reactivation Campaigns

Many people will tell you that sending an email asking your subscribers if they still want to receive your content is a great way to reactivate subscribers.

Method 1

Something like, “We haven’t seen you in a while! Do you still want to hear from us?” with a call-to-action button.

NOTE: There are a ton of creative ways you can play with this method.

Method 2

I like to simply include the Reactivation segment with my normal sending segment and include them in my regularly scheduled newsletter that will go out to my audience.

You could also combine the two and alternate the method each time.

Final Resuscitation

At some point there isn’t much you can do with a subscriber who doesn’t want to live in your ecosystem.

You’ve tried over and over to reactivate them with no success.

For these lost souls… we’ll give them one last chance.

Last Chance Segment

The risk of sending to email addresses who have not engaged with your brand in over a year is a very risky endeavor as those emails may have been abandoned and could have become a hated Spam Trap.

The last chance segment should include subscribers who have previously clicked on your content, but have not clicked on any of your content in the last 365 days

What To Say

Now for the “Last Chance” message, you want to get to the point. Ask them if they still want to receive your emails to verify by clicking on something. If not, let them know you will stop sending them your newsletter.

Example:

Be Sure To Automate It

The best way to integrate the Last Chance campaign is to set it up as an automation/workflow.

Based on your ESP there are a number of ways to do this, but basically anyone who enters your Last Chance segment, should automatically recieve the last chance email asking them if they still want to be on your list.

The info and examples in this email were from the point of view of a newsletter operator. There are additional techniques for ecommerce, SaaS, and service based brands which I will share in the future.

But in all, ensuring you have a sunset policy in place and are following a proper reactivation strategy is the key to scaling a highly engaged email list.

Let’s raise your subscribers from the dead,
Chris Miquel

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris