A clever type of campaign you can launch with your email list is to try and reactivate those who have yet to engage in some time. Inactive subscribers are those who were once part of your email list but either haven’t opened in some time or engaged. The nice thing about inactive subscribers is that they are not a lost cause and can be reactivated and transformed back into your brand’s purchasers with the proper workflow, and it’s done easily. However, you want to ensure that these people get these emails you want to avoid spam vs. inbox. Reach out to Warmy.io for email deliverability concerns to ensure your reactivation efforts are not in vain. This article explains exactly how to reactivate inactive subscribers without fail, as well as why Warmy.io and similar services should be part of your toolkit.
Understanding the Importance of Reactivating Dormant Subscribers
Yet these non-active subscribers remain a crucial component of your overall email universe. They opted in to receive your correspondence, which means they’re more inclined to resubscribe than someone who never had contact with you to begin with. Trying to get them to resubscribe is like keeping a sinking ship of a list and a list of lost profits. This is where a reactivation campaign successfully delivered can do the trick. It acknowledges that they remember why they signed up for your list.
A small discount off something relevant or valuable content, and you’ve got their attention (and hopefully, reengagement) to bolster your engagement rates and raise your sender score for better email deliverability. This is where Warmy.io comes in to ensure that these critical reactivation emails reach the inbox of those unsuspecting subscribers. Because without deliverability, there’s no point in ever launching a reactivation campaign.
Designing a Reactivation Workflow
A reactivation workflow is a drip campaign of automated emails that attempt to re-engage inactive subscribers over time. Make each email valuable, piquing interest, and leading towards an action. Here’s a step-by-step guide to an effective reactivation workflow:
The Friendly Reminder
Your first email in your workflow should be friendly and lighthearted, recognizing your subscriber’s inactivity in a non-threatening way. Use a subject line such as “We Miss You!” or “Still Interested?” to grab their attention. If they have left and you’re sending out a single follow-up email, remind them of why they’re part of your community and offer an incentive, like a discount or free resource, to get them back engaged.
Exclusive Offers or Content
If the initial email has not produced a reply, follow up with a more specific message. Share something exclusive, whether that be early access to a new product, an insider look on your brand or a limited time discount. Highlight how important it is to re-engage with the group – make your segments, or their communities and cohorts feel special.
Personalized Engagement
Your last email in your workflow should be about personalization. This will allow you to create a message that feels personal to them based on their previous activity or interests. For example, provide them product recommendations based on their past purchases or solicit feedback through a 3-minute survey. This gives the subscriber a sense of value and pushes him/her to interact again.
Why an Email Warm-Up Tool Is Crucial
No reactivation campaign can succeed if your emails don’t reach the inbox. But even if you have inbox delivery, you’ll never be able to run a successful reactivation campaign. On top of that, lapsed subscribers are more complicated, for if they’re not engaging with you, it shows email service providers that you’re not sending valuable content. This is where Warmy.io enters the picture. Using an email warmup tool like Warmy.io increases your sender reputation over time.
The tool gets various emails from your domain, sending them to the email warmup tool over time while also simulating positive engagement, opening the emails, marking them as important, etc. It shows email service providers that your emails are valuable and worthwhile resulting in the inbox versus the spam folder. Warmy.io’s email warm-up abilities are perfect for reactivation workflows since they ensure that those previously inactive subscribers are sent your purposeful content. If Warmy.io can assist with deliverability, there’s no need to think about your email’s content but rather revel in the advantages of having extremely engaging material.
Maximizing Engagement Through Value and Timing
Your reactivation campaign works only because you provide value and give an opportunity to engage when people want it. If someone hasn’t wanted to talk to you for a period of time, why would they be eager to talk to you now? Therefore, the reactivation discount, the bonus free gift, and the secret bonus given when they want a break allows them to reactivate engagement on their own terms. Moreover, this should be done over time. You don’t want to give all your opportunities at once because that creates bombardment; instead, allow someone to ponder what you’re giving and space it out over time to keep YOU in THEIR minds. For example, the first email can go a week after inactivity, the second email a week after that, and the last email a month out. When you integrate your scheduling goals with Warmy.io, you ensure not only an accurate time stamp for delivery but also a dependable, effective email delivery in the long run. Warmy not only bolsters deliverability but also provides the analytics to fix your efforts for more effective future campaigns.
Monitoring and Refining Your Workflow
When your reactivation campaign is live, you also want to evaluate its success over time to ensure it stays on course and resonates with your subscribers. For instance, do your reactivation emails gain the open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, etc. that you had hoped for? Monitoring subscriber engagement will help you adjust anything you do in the future. Begin by evaluating your workflow email subject line effectiveness. If one email isn’t receiving as many opens as the others, consider testing a few new subject lines or preview text. Subject lines can be simple and compelling yet also a tad vague. Include the subscriber’s first name in the subject line for a personal touch, or instill urgency by making the CTA a subject line.
Another key metric for success comprises the click rates. If people are opening emails and not clicking through, it’s time to revamp the email and the CTAs (calls-to-action) thereafter. Emails need to be compelling and formatted correctly for the reader to seamlessly enjoy and understand what they should be doing. This means that CTAs need to be above the fold, and the reader needs to know why they should be clicking through, whether it’s to a paywalled article, a survey response, or coupon redemption. But beyond those figures, you might want to assess the overall conversion rate of your drip campaign. Are these emails achieving the purpose they are supposed to getting a strayed subscriber back in the fold or generating a purchase? If so, you need to reconsider your proposition and/or communication style to better align with what your community truly desires.
This will support you in that area as well. You can integrate Warmy.io with your other analytical tools. For instance, Warmy.io solves deliverability issues that make it difficult to have successful campaigns. If you aren’t experiencing a great open rate, for example, on an email, it’s because it’s not hitting the inbox. Warmy.io will adjust your sender score and organic positioning in inboxes to ensure your automations work and that you’re not spending time on efforts that go unseen. This isn’t a one-and-done situation. You need to track to make changes later. You can modify as your subscribers modify. Assess what’s effective and tinker with it, then tinker with something else. Track your whitelisting via Warmy.io and take advantage of any other tracking services available to you. In the end, this will ensure that any efforts to re engage become reengagements that are successful forever.
Conclusion
Reactivating dormant subscribers is a critical part of maintaining a healthy and engaged email list. This means that as long as you have the proper warm-up workflows to send reengagement value discounts, savings opportunities, bonus content, even A/B testing for personalized results after determining why someone went dark then you’ll be able to re-engage your subscribers and there’s no reason they won’t come back either. Of course, they need to receive the opportunity to come back via successful reengagement campaigns. Warm-up services like Warmy.io help make sure these emails go to the inbox and not the spam folder for the best chance upon re engagement. Warm-up services rely upon automatically creating a desirable sender reputation score which only benefits any campaign sent as the time taken to create the warm-up campaign is minimal. An effective reactivation workflow with Warmy.io allows you to easily take those subscribers who didn’t open your emails and reactivate them as paying, loyal customers once again. You win as a brand with better engagement and increased profits.