Are your subscribers not interacting with your emails? Are they not clicking on your links and buying from you? Is it time to launch a re-engagement email campaign? What does that even do anyway? 

Let's find out, shall we? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:15) Want a FREE resource to get more clicks on your emails? Check out Click Tricks.

(4:00) Have you been neglecting your email list?

(7:03) Collect some data before you launch a re-engagement campaign.

(7:36) Focus on clicks - not open rates!

(10:05) Are people disengaged from your list? 

(11:15) What to include in your re-engagement email campaign.

(13:30) Why you should get rid of those who don't engage.

(15:22) Don't be afraid of deleting subscribers from your list!

(16:32) Subject line of the week.

[podcast_subscribe id="7224"]

Have you been neglecting your email list? 

A lot of people who start working with us admit they've been neglecting their email list for a while. This happens a lot, to a lot of marketers, and for a lot of different reasons.

But the good news is that we've got a campaign for that exact scenario. It's called The Terrible Friend, and it works like this: you show up and tell your subscribers that you've been a terrible friend. Because you know that people on your list get value from the topic you teach, but you've still gone and ignored them. So you tell them that the plan going forward is to email them regularly. You'll email on specific days of the week (ideally every day) with valuable information.

And the important bit about this campaign is that you give them a blatant way of saying no. If they’ve moved on and are no longer interested in your solution, you give them the option to click on a link and remove themselves from your email list (i.e. to opt out). Because chances are that if you haven't emailed in a while, some people have forgotten who you are.

And that makes sense. If you haven't emailed anyone for ages, launching this campaign gives you the opportunity to step things up and start emailing regularly again. So be humble and admit it's you who didn't get in touch. People will relate and connect with the human element of this mistake.

Collect some data before you launch a re-engagement campaign

If you haven't emailed your list in a while, you haven't really been in a position for your subscribers to disengage. So before you launch a re-engagement email campaign, you want to send some emails and collect some data. 

We recommend you gather at least one month of data from the emails you send (especially if you email daily) as this will give you a good indication of where people are after you’ve ignored them for ages. You do this to find out whether people are opening your emails and clicking on your links.

Focus on clicks - not open rates!

When you look at your data, focus on clicks rather than open rates. Because Apple and Android are blocking what they’re allowing to be reported back to the email marketing platforms. For example, Apple might mark all of your emails as open while Android may make it look like none of your emails were delivered. Technology is always changing, and you can't rely on open rates - not on a contact-by-contact basis.

But by looking at clicks, you can decide to re-engage the people who haven't been engaging and delete those who are no longer interested. There's one downside to clicks though. Some larger corporations use phishing protection antivirus systems to make sure the email lists their employees sign up to are safe. This piece of software clicks on the links in your emails and checks where the page goes. So to you, it looks like a click from a human being, but it's not. 

Having said that, there's a way around this. We use a bit of technology inside our Automate Hero suite of tools (included for free in our membership The League) that lets us know that a real person was on our website for a bunch of seconds. And we know that’s a human being because a bot would click on the link and come back out in about one second. But if someone stays on the page for 8-9 seconds, we know they're an actual person. We call this ‘proof of life’ because it tells us that there's a real individual behind the email address. And if they click on our links, it's likely they still want to keep hearing from us. 

Are people disengaged from your list?

Once you start emailing regularly again, you want to check that people are clicking on the links inside your emails. And to do that, you need to include links that people can actually click on! 

As a side note, let's not forget that when people click on the unsubscribe link in your emails, that's still a click. And it counts towards your engagement, rather than it being logged as spam. 

If people aren't clicking on your emails, you need to decide what disengagement means to you. You can set your own parameters (something that makes sense in your business), but for us (because we email every day) if someone hasn't clicked on a link in any 60-day period, we consider that person on the verge of disengagement. And that’s when we start approaching with a re-engagement email campaign.

What to include in your re-engagement email campaign?

Our re-engagement email campaign should not sound like you're a needy boyfriend/girlfriend telling people they've not been paying attention to you. Instead, you want to give them a chance to re-engage, rather than inviting them to leave if they're no longer interested. (Don't do that just yet).

Our re-engagement email campaign, which we call the LOL Revival Campaign, is broken down into 3 phrases, which are designed to get people to click and engage with our content. 

• L is for learn.
• O is for opinion.
• L is for loss.

In the first phase (learn) we tell people about a cool thing they can go and have a look at. And then in the second phase (opinion), we point them to something we’d like their opinion on. In other words, during these phases, we use different psychological hot buttons and triggers for people to start engaging with our emails again.

It's only after those two phases that we go into the loss phase, where we tell them we noticed they’ve not been paying attention for a while. Here's where you give them a polite opportunity to either opt back in and let you know they’re still interested or to tell you that you’re not for them anymore.

And that’s okay – because you don’t want to hold people hostage! There’s no point in having people on your email list that you're too scared to email in case they unsubscribe. Those you want on your list are the ones you feel you can email every day. Because if that's not the case, then you've got the wrong subscribers on your email list!

What’s really nice about having a re-engagement email campaign is that you can run them live and then automate them. We don’t run our campaigns live anymore.

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Why you should get rid of those who don't engage

Re-engagement is a fundamental activity in your email marketing. Every time you send an email Gmail and the other service providers check how many people engage. If the percentage of people who don’t engage is high, Gmail and the likes are going to get the idea that your emails aren’t valuable. So they’re going to demote you from the Primary inbox and send you to the Promotions folder. And from there to the Spam folder until you potentially get blacklisted.

And that’s also true if people enter the wrong email address when they register or if they’re no longer using that email address (and you’re getting bounces). There’s also a scenario where you may have spam traps on your list. These are email addresses that were once real but are no longer valid and are used by service providers to identify senders who don't follow email best practices.

In a nutshell, not having an engaged email list damages your reputation as a sender. And the result is that the people who want to receive your emails won't get them. If your reputation is bad or you’ve been blacklisted, when someone tries to sign up for your email list because they want your lead magnet, they won’t get it! Because you haven't proved that you’re a good sender.

This means that your subscribers won't get your marketing. But also, potentially, your customers won't get their login details for your programme!

Don't be afraid of deleting subscribers from your list!

So make sure you have a re-engagement email campaign set up in your business. If people don't engage with you in X amount of days, give them a good chance to click on your links again and let you know they're still around. And if they don't, either stop emailing those people or (better still) remove them from your list. 

That might sound a bit scary, but by doing that, you’ll immediately see an increase in your email deliverability. More people receiving your emails means more people open them, click on links, and buy - because they are actually seeing your marketing! You'll have a cleaner list and you'll be able to send love to it regularly. Trust us when we say this is a powerful way to increase your sales and your revenue.

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “Unfair advantage (today’s training)” and it was for an email that was sent in the build-up to a webinar. We were telling people we wanted to share with them an unfair advantage that we have in our business. So check it out! 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

How To Increase Your Open Rates (They’re Wrong But…)

What to do if you have a high unsubscribe rate.

6 Things You Didn’t Know Your Email Marketing Platform Could Do.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about how to create a successful re-engagement email campaign) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast. 

And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!

Unknown 0:24

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy

Unknown 0:25

hello to web marketing show we're talking about successful subscriber reengagement email campaigns.

Unknown 0:32

Now before we get into the dig into this, get into this before we get into this Jesus before people can need reengaging they need something to disengage from. So it was horrible. We want to give them loads of things to click on in your emails and make them do it, make them do it. So we put together a really cool free resource for you. That's all about driving up the click through rate from every single email that you send. It's called quick tricks and it's full of 12 really creative ways to get more clicks from every single email that you send. It's really easy you can start doing these literally from the very next email you send whatever that is. So go and grab the free resource just head over to email marketing heroes.com forward slash tricks.

Unknown 1:03

He is a comedy hypnotist. It's comedy hypnotist Robert temple,

Unknown 1:08

and he might take up salsa dancing, it's psychological mind reader Kennedy. You recovered I think everyone knows everything. No.

Unknown 1:20

He's wearing a grey t shirt today.

Unknown 1:23

He has red hair. It's not real.

Unknown 1:29

Which of your facts is the one that people look to you and talk to you about most of coming almost backwards? Probably the penguin thing.

Unknown 1:48

You have to be I'd have to be really careful when I say I have to be really careful when I go on with penguins forget about penguins because if you say those words in the wrong order, you've said a lot for going backwards and then people walk away from it and they don't talk to you about that quite as much. That's a different thing. So you're thinking about salsa dancing.

Unknown 2:03

I am you know that I'm doing this thing where this year I've taken a tale of two hobbies which intimidate me or challenge me in some way.

Unknown 2:10

And I'm not like they're not like business business or viable. Like other stuff that you've done.

Unknown 2:14

Yeah, but it's not business viable. So I'm learning to DJ and I am learning Meitei because both of I know nothing about music. I've got no musical ability and my tie I'm not a physical person usually I don't like violence. I don't like being close proximity to people. And then sort of on my radar always want to be what sort of dancer Yeah, I guess I can't and I've done it never done any dancing, anything like that. And I've got some friends who are in the salsa sort of scene here in Newcastle and I keep saying you should come along. I thought well, that terrifies me as well. I've got no rhythm. I've got to have a bit more than from doing the DJ thing. It's helpful but again, the close proximity down somehow strange as terrifying was

Unknown 2:45

wanting to do it as well. But again, for all those reasons because it intimidates me. I've chosen to stick to send an email. I desperately would love to do it, but I'm not gonna push yourself that far outside that comfort zone.

Unknown 2:53

You go there you go. Hello. Every week on this show. We show you how to make more sales and earn more money from your email subscribers. We talk about email marketing, strategy, psychology tactics and share what's working right now to make more sales online making you the email marketing hero of your business with a brand new episode every email marketing Wednesday, be sure to hit subscribe on that subscribe button on your podcast player.

Unknown 3:15

We'd also love to have you leave a review while you're there. I think it's almost all in the same place. More or less so that just hit the little five star rating thing. Type a few nice words and it's know what you liked about the show what you what you love about the show

Unknown 3:24

and what you're obsessed with about the show. Yeah, and then which one of us you prefer? We ended up with that with our guests on a previous podcast at the end of uglies. Big huge guests on the on the show. And we had a very guest heavy show. And then at the end would say now which one of us do you prefer? What would make them would make them pick anyway? Yes, we're talking about what you know, neglected subscribers, reengaging subscribers. Some people a lot of people come to us and say look, I feel a bit ashamed. But I've got this email list of you know, it could be a small list could be huge. That doesn't matter. And people do both ends that spectrum. And I've neglected them after I've ignored them haven't really sent them much stuff or I feel it I've abused them a little bit. What do we what do I do? And it's a it's a great question because people at all stages have this, this happen and for different different reasons really. And the good news is we've got a campaign for this there's two elements to it. If you feel like you've ignored your your email subscribers, we have a thing called the terrible friend campaign where we literally show up and say, Hey, I've been a really terrible friend, you subscribe to my email list. You want to get some value about this topic. And I've ignored it. I haven't really been in touch very much. So here's the plan for going forward starting from Monday or whatever. I'm going to email you every Monday or every day or every second Tuesday, whatever with valuable stuff about the topic. This is the topic and here's the really important bit about email. You then blatantly give them a way of saying no, but they have now moved on they no longer interest they found a solution elsewhere you say but if this is no longer of interest, and you can't forgive me for the radio silence of the last few last while, click right here, and I'll remove it from an email list. I suppose I'm gonna do I'm gonna give people the option to opt out. And the reason we need to do that is if you don't if any of us don't hear from somebody for a little while we forget who they are. Right? That your name lands in that email box that just how many emails I mean, he must have definitely got I don't even know who that is. I don't know who that is. It's usually because you haven't engaged with our emails in a long time. We haven't sent any emails for a while. So I'll just be upfront about this is who I am. This is why you joined my email list in the first place. And if you don't hear from me anymore, click here and you won't, that's pretty

Unknown 5:13

good. And one of the nice things about it is actually if you're going from nothing to emailing, say every day or three times a week or something, it's actually you can do it quite fast. If you're going from a weekly a regular weekly email newsletter to every day that's a little bit more difficult. You still need to step it up a little bit but the truth is, if you haven't emailed anybody for ages, going from nothing to everything is actually a spine it's going from nothing to like slowly stepping it up. As long as you use this email campaign has the opportunity to do it, and link it and again, as Kennedy said, give people the opportunity to get out with that email. You might even wanna send two slightly different variant versions of this email. So send one today one tomorrow slight different variant variation of it, so that more of your email list will see it. But yeah, it's a really interesting it's an interesting way to do it. Just Be humble on the thing people connect to that mistake people like the human element of it and it's really good, but that's something to do if you haven't been emailing your subscribers and therefore they haven't had the chance to disengage, right, that's not them disengaging that's 100% of your list is disengaged because you've been disengaged. So that's a different thing, right. So that's what happens. That's what happens if you're in a position where you haven't even given them the chance to disengage. What if you if you're in that position before you look at any form of proper reengagement, which we can talk about next, you will need to send a bunch of emails because you need to collect a bunch of data like I would be saying, if you even if you email every day, really but if you email three or four times a week, you probably need to send at least a month probably two months worth of emails really to get a good new indication as to where people are at if you've ignored them for ages. Otherwise, you don't really have any data. Do you have any data on who's opening and clicking your emails because, well, you haven't been sending emails for them to open and click on.

Unknown 6:29

Yeah, we're talking about engagement here. What we tend to look at mostly is clicks the old and the reason being, while basically Apple and Android have all been messing around with what they're blocking and what they're allowing to be reported back to your email marketing platform. So regardless of email marketing platform, Apple and and Google are both blocking on and showing random information Apple might mark all of your emails as open when they weren't Android might block them all from even looking like they were open even if they weren't. It's complicated. But that does mean that we can't rely on looking at Oh, Rob hasn't opened any of my emails for a month. I need to reengage them somehow and then delete if he doesn't re engage. We can't really do that on a contract by contract basis. I can't know for sure. Whether Rob has or has not open an email from me because of the technology changes. So what we can do more reliably. Again, nothing's 100% Because of specific situations, but we can find more accuracy in in the fact that people were clicking. The only exception just to give you a full picture is there are some spam and spoof and Phishing Protection type antivirus type systems that some larger corporations use when they're when their employees sign up for email list that will go and click the links in your emails for you to check where the page goes to and a way of getting around that just because one of the conversations gonna come up is we use a bit of technology inside of our automate hero bit of kit. It's called automate hero, which is part of a bunch of programmes. And we we can then basically decide whether somebody is engaged by measuring that they were on a certain website for say, eight seconds, because a bot will click the link checkout on the link and come back it'll take about maybe one second. Whereas a human being will stay on that page for maybe eight 910 seconds or longer. So we could do it that way. Let's get a little bit too technical, or we want to basically do is make sure I like to call it proof of life. I want to know the person who's on the email list is still using that email address and they still want to be hearing from us are still opening and taking a look at our email and the stuff that we're talking about in the email. So how do we do that we make basically the first thing we have to do is make sure the emails we are sending as well as being regular what Robert just said, but also that there is something to click in the emails. If you're saying I send emails regularly every day Kennedy I'm sending emails every single day and people aren't engaging and I say well, have you got any links in the emails? The answer was no. But of course, they're not clicking of course, so make sure there are some links. Funny thing when you got the site folks, clicking the unsubscribe link in your emails cancels a click just funny, funny thing even though they are asking to not receive your emails anymore, but it is quite funny that that does count as engagement rather than it being counted as spam. If the reporting spammers send spam so that's what we think about as engaged people who have actually showing us proof of life. So when people have disengaged, you can put your own parameters on this because we email every single day, our personal ones that we want in our business, if somebody does not click a link in any 60 day rolling period, so any 60 day period, if there's no clicks at all, where they're going to consider the person is on the verge of disengagement. That's how we're going to start approaching them to try and reengage them.

Unknown 9:25

Yeah. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing is we don't do what most people do, which is turn up and go, Hey, there's been needy boyfriends, or girlfriends. I noticed. Yeah, I don't know why. Why haven't you? Why would you pay attention to my emails anymore? You haven't? You've left me on red. Effectively. Have you want to do that? You want to tell them initially not pointing out the big flaw in the problem. You don't want you don't tell them go hey, listen, you you seem to think I'm boring? Is it that I'm boring and then the guy you are boring and then unsubscribe. Instead, you want to give them a chance to reengage you want to lead with a positive thing. So we literally just have a couple of phases in our campaign based on education based on driving opinions. Designed to get people to click and engage with our stuff. We call this the LOL revival campaign. The way that we do it three phases L which is for learn, oh, which is for opinion, and L which is for loss. And in those first two phases, which is the vast majority of those emails. were literally just saying hey, listen, here's a cool thing for you to go look at go and look at it and look at it and look at it. And then the second phase is here's a cool thing. We'd love your opinion ongoing give us your opinion, give us give us your opinion. And we're giving different psychological hot buttons and triggers for people to engage with. And it's only after those two phases if people have been through those emails, which from memory is probably seven emails, I think or six emails, six emails, I think it's only then the last four emails or three months, four emails. I think they go into it and say, Hey, listen, I notice you haven't been paying attention for a while. I used to be interested and they just give people a really polite opportunity to either opt back in and say yes, I'm still here. I'm still interested or to say actually, you know what, it's been great, but this is not for me anymore.

I'm gonna I'm gonna back out of this. And again, either of those things are okay, we don't want to hold people hostage. We don't want to. There's no point in not emailing people in order to try and get them to subscribe and for long because there's no point having a list that you're scared to email. You want to have subscribers you feel like you can email every day. without pissing them off. Otherwise, you've got the wrong book, but your subscribers are using the wrong kind of emails. And this is really important to have set up. What's really nice is you can run it live to your list, and then you can take it like many of most of our email campaigns. The method that we teach the score email engine is you run live D list and get the benefit of it. And then you automate it. So we don't ever run this live anymore. We run it live the very first time we wrote it, but it's running live somebody's probably right now as I say these words is probably has been triggered as hasn't engaged within last 60 days and is now receiving those emails, that's most likely to be happening. It's really important to do this. Because without having a highly engaged email list. What happens is every time you send an email out Gmail and all of the other email service providers all those email systems are looking at how many people engage with emails when you send them out, if your percentage of people who don't, don't engage with your emails is high. If almost nobody is engaging with your emails, they're gonna start to get an idea that your emails are not that valuable. You're sending it to people who say, Oh, you must really don't want to receive them. So they're going to demote you from the primary inbox and the promotions and promotions, the spam and then eventually you can't get blacklisted. Especially if some of the people who's emailed us you've got your email list have put their email address in wrong so you're getting like bounces between the inside and get delivered, or they've stopped using their email address and Gmail, for example, use it as what's called a spam trap, which is they basically go we know that this email address is no longer being used by the user, but it might be on someone's email list and if that person is not keeping their email list, hygienic, they don't keep it clean and keeping people engaged. They're gonna keep email in this email list. And if they do that, we know that they're not doing a good job of having their email engagement. So they quit. It's called a spam trap. Every time you email one of those email addresses, which is a spam trap that they're using to trap people. You're again damaging reputation. So all to fix all of that really scary stuff. Oh, by the way, the result of all of that is your emails don't get received by all the people who do want to receive your emails. So when people join your email list, they want your lead magnet and they don't get it. Why because you've been blacklisted or you because you've been put on the spam folder because basically, you haven't proved that you're a good sender. So all the people who you want to email because of your programme, or because you met them in a thing or whatever, they will receive your emails and that sucks your customers receive their login details or access to something they've purchased and you can't do your marketing so it sucks. So all you got to do is have it set up so that if somebody does not need that the whole solution to all of this is set up so that somebody does not engage with you in X amount of time. And you got to put into a sequence to figure out are they still alive, give them a good chance to click to engage, let you know that this will want to be around ie Proof of Life. And here's the scary bit. Anybody who doesn't after that sequence, you can remove your stop emailing, you're either gonna delete them altogether or you're just unsubscribe them, whichever one works best for you and your system. Okay, so that's a little bit scary, but by doing that you will immediately see an increase in your email deliverability because more people receiving your emails that means people open your emails, more people buying your stuff because they're actually seeing your emails all because your email list is cleaner, and you're not sending any emails. Really, really powerful stuff. Alright, so we're definitely gonna have this in place set up, send it love to your list, and then automate the whole darn thing. Sounds good. All right. Nice brief run through of that. I think it's really inspiring hopefully to get this stuff set up and you can immediately increase your sales and your emails. Honestly, it's really really powerful. Let's get this week's subject line of the week subject line what have you got?

This one was the world's unfair advantage and then in brackets today's training again it was in the build up to a webinar that we've been doing lately. That's all that was there for. And it said, we wanted to give them our own unfair advantage that we've got in our business we wanted to build to give it to them. I love it. I

love it. That's unfair advantage. Today's training, subject line of the week subject line. Everybody has been leaving us lovely reviews over on Apple podcasts. We are gonna get back into the habit of reading some of the math on the show. So please, massively helps us because you don't have as it helps us to reach more people when you leave us a review also, that lets us know that who the human beings are, who have us in their ears every single week, we really wanna know who you are. So leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll read them out on the show. We'd really appreciate it and we'll see you next week. For another episode of email. Marketing. Show