Re-Engaging Dormant Subscribers For Higher Open Rates

Have you ever wondered if the inactive subscribers on your email list are silently hurting your deliverability rates?

Join me, Gary Redmond, on this episode of Unbox the Inbox as we unravel the techniques to re-engage those silent subscribers and maintain a top-tier email list.

You'll learn why segmenting your active and inactive subscribers is crucial, and discover how to deploy two powerful automations: a re-engagement campaign for those who haven't opened an email in 60 days, and a critical cleanup process to unsubscribe those who remain inactive after 90 days.

By implementing these strategies, you'll avoid wasting resources on unresponsive leads and ensure your emails reach the people who matter most.

But that's not all! I'm thrilled to announce our upcoming Email Conversion Workshop scheduled for Wednesday, September 4th, 2024. This 90-minute, pay-what-you-want workshop is your golden ticket to mastering email marketing and transforming your emails into high-converting sales tools.

Starting at just one dollar, this session is packed with actionable insights that will elevate your email game. Register now at www.subboxsecrets.com/email-closer and get ready to boost your conversion rates.

I can't wait to share these invaluable strategies with you and see you at the workshop!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Re-Engaging Inactive Subscribers Through Automation
• 8:58 Email Conversion Workshop Coming Up

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back to Unbox the Inbox with me, your host, gary Redmond. On this podcast, you'll learn how to grow your subscription business using the power of free and mostly automated email marketing, and we'll hopefully have some fun doing it too. I'm a co-founder of BusterBoxcom and also a mentor and coach helping founders like me and you create their dream life through their subscription business, so today's episode is going to be talking about re-engaging inactive subscribers. Okay, so why would we want to do that? And what's the importance of having a segmentation between people who are actually active on your email list and inactive? Because you might be thinking what's the harm in just sending emails to people who are not opening them? But actually that's quite important that you try and avoid doing that, because it actually harms your email deliverability. Okay, so, like email service providers like Gmail, yahoo, they basically use engagement metrics to determine the quality of your emails, and if a large portion of your subscribers aren't actually opening them, they might interpret your emails as unwanted or even spam. Okay, so as a result, if they can see a large percentage of the emails that you're sending, or the recipients that you're sending your emails to and not opening them, they are more likely to put you into the spam folder, okay, making it even harder for your active subscribers to see your messages. Okay, and obviously that leads to lower open rates and clearly, lower conversion rates, okay, so that's why it's crucial to focus on sending emails only to those who are actually interested in engaging with your content, and the best way to do that is to, number one, try and only send emails to people you have tagged as engaged and we're going to talk about how to do that in this episode but also by re-engaging those who have gone quiet and, finally, unsubscribing people who have totally become inactive. So, now that we understand why it's so important, let's talk about how to actually re-engage these active subscribers. Okay, and luckily for you and for me, if we're all lazy in here or we prefer automation, then I'm gonna talk you through how to automate this process. Okay, because everything that we wanna do, if possible, should be automated, saving us time and effort when trying to run our business, okay, so we're gonna focus on setting up two key automations, okay. The first one is a re-engagement campaign to wake up those sleepy subscribers, and the second is a cleanup automation to unsubscribe to people who are totally inactive. Okay, so let's break these down.

Speaker 1: 2:18

So the re-engagement campaign. So, essentially, what you want to do is you want to create an automation, and the trigger for this automation is that a person, your contact, hasn't opened an email for, let's say, for example, 60 days, which is what we have. So what it does is, essentially, it's an automation that says a contact hasn't opened any email for 60 days, we're going to mark them as inactive and as soon as they get, they're going to send them an email and the email is going to say hey, do you want to continue to receive our emails? Because we know that you haven't received, we haven't, you haven't opened an email in the last 60 days. Okay, um, and what happens then is if, if they don't open this email, we're going to resend it to them and we're going to give it another seven days and we're going to send them again and then, obviously, like the actual email you can send, like you can offer a valuable piece of content, you can offer a discount or a friendly reminder, we basically just have something like hey, we haven't heard from you in a while. Do you still want to receive your emails? We don't want to bother you If you want to continue to read them or receive them. Just click here and you'll remain on our list, or click here to unsubscribe. Okay, and that way you can make and you can make sure, and obviously, if they don't open it, don't click, we're going to move them into the second automation, which I'll discuss in a second.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Okay, so we're essentially going to trigger an automation that's sent to people if they haven't opened or clicked an email in the last 60 days, and then what we're going to do is we're going to tag them as inactive and when the tag inactive is applied, we're going to send them an email and we're going to give them 30 days to respond. Okay, now what happens is the second automation that we're going to create essentially kicks in when someone is tagged as inactive and then it's going to wait for 30 days, okay, which is going to give them time to respond to the emails that we've sent them to the re-engagement campaigns the first one and the second one to follow up, and basically it's going to say, if someone is tagged as inactive, and it's going to check again after 30 days have they opened or clicked on any email in the past 30 days? So at this point we're now talking 90 days since they last engaged with any of our emails and they still haven't opened or clicked, we're just going to unsubscribe them. Okay. So the action at the end of this automation is, if they're just going to check, had they opened their engagement any emails in the last 30 days, no, then unsubscribe from all lists.

Speaker 1: 4:32

Okay, so this keeps your list healthy, obviously, as I mentioned, and ensures you're only sending emails to those who are genuinely interested. But you might be wondering, like, why? Why would I want to unsubscribe anyone? Okay, aren't all leads valuable? Okay, the answer is leads are valuable, but not all leads are created equal. Okay, remember, like, if they're not opening any emails although it's hard to let them go and I feel this too but they're not bringing any value, okay, worse, they're probably potentially hurting your ability to reach your active subscribers.

Speaker 1: 5:01

And you're also probably paying for the more, the more email subscribers that you have. I know, certainly we are. We're paying. I think it's almost a thousand dollars a month for active campaign at this point. Obviously, we, for the more email subscribers that you have, I know certainly we are paying. I think it's almost $1,000 a month for ActiveCampaign at this point. Obviously, we have a list of nearly 200,000 people, so it's kind of obviously worth it for us.

Speaker 1: 5:16

But if you have people hanging around and you're paying to have them on your email list and they're also potentially harming your deliverability, it's better to just get rid. Okay, and by keeping your list lean and filled but only your engaged subscribers you're actually more likely to see better open rates, deliverability and, ultimately, more conversions. Okay, so don't worry about losing potential customers. If they're truly interested, they would have answered your re-engagement campaign or they'll resubscribe when they go back to your website or when they find other ways to engage with your content. Okay.

Speaker 1: 5:44

Now there's one thing I would note about this. Okay, if your list is relatively small let's say, under 1,000 or maybe even under 5,000, okay, it might be worth holding off on deleting those inactive contacts. Okay, the reason being is we are sending regular emails. We're sending three emails a week to our entire list, so if they're not opening them, it's clear that they're clearly inactive. Okay, whereas someone who's just getting started with a small email list, you might only send an email every week or every two weeks or every month. You're actually not giving people many chances to open your emails. Okay, if you only send an email once a month, or even once a week. There's a chance that someone could go 30 or 60 days without seeing your emails. Okay, because, like you know, the average open rate for an email we send might be 25.

Speaker 1: 6:30

Okay, with a big, with a list our size. Okay, yours might be higher, but the point is I would try and hold on to as many leads as possible if I was really small. That's just my personal opinion, and because you might not know what you're doing with email marketing at the moment, but you might figure that out over the next six or twelve months. Okay, so I wouldn't be deleting emails if I had a small list. Okay, I would probably, though I would try and um tag people who are inactive and only send my emails to people who are, however, who are not tagged inactive, and I would probably do the re-engagement campaign. I I don't think I would delete the emails if I were you. Okay, because you're so small, you're probably not growing your email list that much and you're probably not emailing them that much. Okay, so we don't want to kind of do something like that's really valuable for us to do because we're sending so many emails and we have so many people on the list, but for someone smaller that might not be the case, okay.

Speaker 1: 7:20

So I mean, in terms of setting this up, as I mentioned, the trigger for the automation for the re-engagement campaign is that if someone hasn't opened an email in the last 60 days, you wanna basically tag them as inactive. Okay, then you're gonna send them. The actions then are going to be the tag and you're gonna send them an email. You're gonna wait for seven days and you're going to check. If they opened the previous email, then you can resend it. If they didn't, and in that case obviously we're still going into where we're, 67 days in now and you can, if you want, you can, try it one more time before before you let the 90 days come up.

Speaker 1: 7:52

But in terms of the actual deletion, then you can do another automation that basically waits 30 days and after their tag is inactive and you can do a check then if they have not after 30 days, have they opened an email in the last 30 days or not? The answer is no, they can be deleted, okay. So remember, a healthy list is better, better than a big list, for just for you know, for vanity's sake, okay. So remember, guys, re-engaging inactive subscribers isn't just about cleaning up your list. It's about improving the overall performance and ensuring your messages reach those who truly remember guys. Re-engaging inactive subscribers isn't just about cleaning up your list. It's about improving the overall performance and ensuring your messages reach those who truly want to hear from you. Okay, and it's a crucial step for anyone who's serious about email marketing.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Okay, so my question for you this week is do you unsubscribe or do you manage the deliverability of your emails? Okay, do you re-engage or do you unsubscribe inactive contacts? And if not, why not? I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions for me, if it's something you'd like to follow up with me, you can go ahead and send me a quick message, or you can post in the Subscription Box. Success Facebook group.

Speaker 1: 8:58

And just before I go, I'm running a workshop next week. And just before I go, I'm running a workshop next week. And just before I go, I'm running a workshop this week, on wednesday, the 4th of september 2024. In this workshop, I'm going to be showing you how to create sales emails that actually drive conversions from your list. It's a pay, what you want and workshop, and you can go to subboxsecretscom, forward, slash email hyphen closer to register for the workshop and, as I said, you can pay as little as one dollar to to join the workshop and learn directly with me for 90 minutes on how to get your emails to actually sell. So hope this episode was helpful. I'll see you and see you next week.