Wake Up Sleepy Subscribers with Marketing Automation
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Up to 80% of email databases are classified as inactive.* These "sleepy subscribers" haven't engaged with your emails in months, which negatively impacts your overall email program health. But with the right re-engagement strategy, you'll discover a cost-effective way to convert inactive subscribers into revenue! Learn from email marketing expert Mike Madden in our webinar, "Wake Up Sleepy Subscribers with Marketing Automation!"
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Wake Up Sleepy Subscribers with Marketing Automation
- 1. Wake Up Sleepy Subscribers with Marketing Automation Mike Madden Demand Generation Program Manager Marketo
- 2. • This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will be sent to you after the webinar concludes. • Have a question? Chat in the bottom left and I’ll get to your questions after the webinar. • Posting to social? Use our hashtag - #mktgnation • There is a brief survey after this webinar. Housekeeping
- 3. • What is a reactivation campaign and why use it • Email Deliverability and Inboxing • 4 steps to get your reactivation campaigns started • Examples of reactivation campaigns • Ways to leverage marketing automation to turn inactive subscribers into loyal customers Agenda
- 4. Page 4© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 What is a Reactivation Campaign? A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time.
- 5. Page 5© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Why Do Subscribers Become Inactive? Subscribers become inactive for various reasons, including: • Changed interests • Expectations not set appropriately • Too many emails • Job change • Irrelevant content • Too busy • Changed email address
- 6. Page 6© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Why Use Reactivation Campaigns? 1. Determine who wants to hear from you 2. Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you 3. Clean out your email lists 4. If the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers
- 8. Page 8© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Email Deliverability = Total Emails Delivered / Total Emails Sent Email Deliverability
- 9. Page 9© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Getting Your Email Delivered is Tougher
- 10. Page 10© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 According to Return Path, just 79% of commercial emails land in the inbox
- 11. Page 11© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Quick Definitions Soft Bounce: A soft bounce is a temporary problem with email deliverability, usually due to an unavailable server or a full inbox. Hard Bounce: A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email, usually a result of an email address being non-existent, invalid or blocked. Spam Trap: A spam trap is an email address traditionally used to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without permission. But they are also set up to identify email marketers with poor permission and list management practices.
- 12. Page 12© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Sender Reputation Sender Reputation Unique Clicks Open Rate Positive Engagements Spam Complaints & Spam Trap Hits Hard Bounces Blacklists Negative Engagements
- 13. Page 13© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Quick Definitions: Email Inboxing If you had 98.5% email deliverability but a sender score of 60, your email inboxing rates will decline.
- 14. • Old, inactive email addresses are more likely to hard bounce and/or be converted to a spam trap • Inactive email addresses can lower your sender score, which decreases email deliverability and inboxing • Sending to inactive email addresses is risky and will decrease the ROI on email marketing campaigns Key Takeaways on Email Deliverability
- 15. Reactivation Campaigns - How to Get Started
- 16. 4 Steps to Getting Started
- 17. Events Web Form Email Mobile Web Visit Email Step #1: Isolate Your Sleepy Subscribers Acquired the email address Engaged Subscriber Sleeping Subscriber Welcome Series Jan 1st First Purchase Feb 15th No Engagement > 6 Months
- 18. Keep A Pulse On Trends… Inactive Subscriber Abandoned cart on first potential purchase Didn’t open welcome series emails Stopped Engaging After One Time Offer
- 19. Step #2: Test Content, Offers & Language • Tone and writing voice • Special offers • Access to exclusive content, exclusive subscriber group or incentives • New content, videos, cheat sheets, or products • Links to opt-out or update email preferences • Make it easy for them to come back • Use segmentation for increased effectiveness
- 20. Further Segment Your Subscribers Subscribers Email Domain Past Behaviors Demographics Last Engagement Channel
- 22. Subject Line/Copy Writing Tips • Be different • Use $ Off and % Off • Include “We Miss You” in the subject line • Get emotional • Be human
- 23. Page 23© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Great Example: Crocs
- 24. Page 24© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Great Example: BevMo
- 25. Page 25© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Great Example: Kate Spade
- 26. Page 26© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 One Final Example: Marketo VS
- 27. Page 27© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 The Winner Was The Reactivation Email! The Results: • 70% higher open rate • 325% higher click to open rate • 621% higher click through rate This email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control!
- 28. Reactivation Series 1 Reactivation Series 2 Reactivation Series 3 Step #3: Think Beyond One and Done Remove email from normal campaigns
- 29. Progressively Be More To the Point Reactivation Campaign 1 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: It’s been a while • Cadence: Bi-weekly Reactivation Campaign 2 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: We Miss You • Cadence: Once per month Reactivation Campaign 3 • Series Length: 3 emails • Key Message: Re-subscribe or Else • Cadence: Once per quarter
- 30. Step #4: Give Subscribers A Way Out
- 31. Page 31© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Great Example: Hotels.com
- 32. Page 32© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Set Goals, Implement and Measure 1. Establish Goals • How many people do you want to re-engage? • How many email addresses should be scrubbed out? • By what percentage would you like to improve deliverability, inboxing, and ROI? 2. Implement • Define “engagement” and “inactivity” • Determine messaging, offers, storyline, and cadence 3. Measure • Re-engagement is a success, not necessarily an immediate purchase • Unsubscribes are a good thing!
- 33. Page 33© Marketo, Inc. 4/15/2016 Keys to Bring Your Database Back to Life Understand your goals and how to measure Isolate your sleepy subscribers Test fun offers and language Think beyond one and done campaigns Give sleepy subscribers a big unsubscribe button
Editor's Notes
- And with that let’s get going!
- And with that let’s get going!
- A reactivation campaign is an email campaign or multiple campaigns specifically targeted towards “sleeping subscribers”, or subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in a long period of time. A marketer typically has a list of customers or subscribers, with as many as 25-50% of these people classified as “inactive”. How you define inactive emails depends entirely on your email cadence. If you regularly email your database 2-3 times a week, an inactive email might be one that hasn’t engaged in the past 90 days. For those that only send out emails on monthly or quarterly schedules, inactive emails might be defined as no engagement in the past year. These people have raised their hand in the past, either through showing intent, engagement, or making a prior purchase. Therefore you have spent valuable time and not to mention probably a good amount of money on grabbing their attention in the first place. So, I ask, why not try to get the most value out of your efforts and re-engage those folks?
- Subscribers become inactive for various reasons, including: Changed interests Too busy Changed email address
- Why use reactivation campaigns? Awaken the sleeping subscribers that still want to hear from you Determine who doesn’t want to hear from you Clean out your email lists – the older emails become, meaning the longer it’s been since they have engaged with you, the higher the likelihood they could become a hard bounce or a spam trap And most importantly, if the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than keeping an existing one, you should do everything you can to re-engage inactive customers or subscribers. Reactivation campaigns build upon a brand’s previous investments in acquiring and targeting new customers who already are aware of and have previously engaged with your brand. Re-engaging customers just makes good economic sense. In an Experian whitepaper on email reactivation, they state that they’ve seen thoughtfully planned reactivation campaign strategies deliver up to 14 times the lift in email revenue. The BIG idea here is that whatever normal campaigns you are running to these inactive subscribers isn’t working. The language or the offers just isn’t enough to keep them engaged. And if it’s been a long while since their last engagement, they get tired of receiving your emails and mark you as spam. Rather than let that happen, you are proactively asking if they still want to receive communications from you. Before we dive into reactivation campaigns, we first need to review email deliverability and inboxing. The biggest reason, in my opinion, to run reactivation campaigns is that old inactive emails can hurt your email deliverability and inboxing, and ultimately the ROI of your email marketing programs. With that, let’s cover email deliverability.
- It doesn’t take a mathematician to solve it. Email deliverability is the total number of delivered emails over the total emails sent.
- Getting your email delivered is tougher. Much tougher. Five years ago, getting your email delivered was a matter of having the right email address and that the email was not super obvious spam. By that, I mean your email didn’t say FREE in all caps 50 times. But in today’s world, avoiding spammy words isn’t enough to hit the inbox. Big internet service providers have followed Gmail’s push towards an engagement model. What does that mean? You may have noticed that Gmail now has tabs: one for primary email, another for social, and a third for promotions. Hitting that primary inbox is increasingly difficult because now Gmail looks at several things: Continuously opened emails Unique clicks as well as multiple clicks Scrolling Frequency of engagements (does the recipient open emails and engage with them regularly) To be placed in the primary tab, your email recipients need to be highly engaged with your emails. But if 50% of your email list is classified as inactive, that can make it much tougher for your engaged recipients to receive your email in the primary tab.
- According to Return Path, only 79% of commercial emails hit the primary inbox. That means 1/5 end up in junk, spam, hard bounce or go undelivered. If you are counting on all 100% of delivered emails to hit the inbox and 1 in 5 do not, that’s a BIG deal! Also, how many times have you ever looked in your spam folder and clicked a bunch of those emails? Probably not often. When we see that something has been determined spam, we tend to keep our distance. I think part of why this number is at 79% because many companies send to inactive email addresses just as much as they send to active ones. Sending to inactive emails tends to increase your chances of hitting spam traps, hard bounces, receiving spam complaints, and lowers your overall email inboxing rates.
- Soft Bounce: A soft bounce is a temporary problem with email deliverability, usually due to an unavailable server or a full inbox. Hard Bounce: A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email, usually a result of an email address being non-existent, invalid or blocked. Spam Trap: A spam trap is an email address traditionally used to expose illegitimate senders who add email addresses to their lists without permission. But they are also set up to identify email marketers with poor permission and list management practices. Inactive email addresses can turn into hard bounces and spam traps, which is why it’s important to identify your subscribers that still want to hear from you and those who don’t. In the population of subscribers you allegedly don’t want to hear from you anymore, there are likely to be emails that will soon hard bounce or become spam traps.
- A sender reputation is the reputation you have as an email sender. Return Path has a tool called Sender Score which rates your IP addresses based on your email sending practices and gives you a score of 1-100. You sender reputation is the #1 deliverability reason why you should run reactivation campaigns. Due to many recent filtering tactics of ISPs, one thing is very clear; consistently sending emails to inactive subscribers without getting them to re-engage with your brand will have adverse effects on both inbox placement and your sender reputation. There are many factors that affect your sender reputation, but the most common ones are subscriber engagement like opens and clicks, positive and negative engagement signals like whitelisting an email addresses or marking an email as spam, hard bounces, if you are listed on a blacklist, spam trap hits, and spam complaints. So being able to manage all of those and keep them to a minimum will help keep your reputation high! If you are sending emails to all of your subscribers, both active and inactive, the frequency of positive engagements compared to negative engagements is much lower than if you were JUST sending to your engaged population. This is important to note for your sender reputation.
- Your sender reputation effects your email inboxing. Inboxing is the percentage of delivered emails that actually hit the primary inbox, not the spam folder or junk folder. In the example above, if you have 98.5% deliverability but a sender reputation score of 60, you might only see 58.8% inboxing on your emails, meaning that over 40% of your emails that you thought were delivered actually just went to the junk folder, spam folder, or went undelivered entirely. That means that about 8,000 emails were not delivered.
- And with that let’s get going!
- And with that let’s get going!
- First, identify the folks who haven’t engaged with your emails, website, or any other web asset of yours in a long time. How do you define a long time? This may vary by your database size and email frequency. If you send subscribers just one or two emails per month, a “long time” might be a year or more. On the other hand, if you send emails daily, something like a 3 month window of zero engagement might be just right. In the example above, a new email address comes into your database on Jan 1. And on Feb 15th, that new email address made their first purchase! You celebrated and continued to market to them to the best of your ability. And boy oh boy, did they love what you sent them. In the engaged subscriber stage, they filled out web forms, clicked emails, engaged with your mobile app, and frequently visited your website. And then just like that, they went cold without even saying good bye. This happens far too often and companies do not take advantage of subscribers that once loved to engage with their brands and then fell asleep. This is how you isolate your sleepy subscribers. If you use a marketing automation solution, you can set up triggers that automatically listen for inactivity windows like the one above to be met and then send reactivation emails. This process allows you to easily and proactively address your sleepy subscribers without having to constantly worry about creating new campaigns.
- As with anything, data will become your best friend when you are running reactivation campaigns. All of your inactive subscribers have one very big thing in common: one way or another, they all become inactive. But why? Well, start segmenting your inactive subscribers and look for trends. You might learn that 50% of your inactive subscribers never opened your welcome series emails, which laid out the relationship they could expect, built branding and trust, detailed the email cadence and offer types from your subscription program. Do you think they could be turned off by your email programs since they never saw your welcome series in the first place. You bet! Or what about inactive subscribers that stopped engaging after a sweet deal or one time offer you ran? You might find that most of your inactives stopped engaging right after the big blow out sale campaign you ran or summer marketing webinar series. In each scenario, could you have done something differently to try to repair the leak in the early stages of subscribership? Yes. Take the example where an email address doesn’t engage with your welcome series emails. You could consider sending them new or additional incentives early in the relationship, such as free shipping on your new product line or access to exclusive ebooks and videos. When done right, reactivation campaigns won’t just solve for inactive subscribers but also identify which behaviors might have led to the inactivity in the first place.
- Step 2 is to test content, offers and new types of language. The variations here include: Tone, writing voice, subject line style Special offers Access to exclusive content, an exclusive subscriber group or incentives New content, videos, cheat sheets, or products Links to opt-out or update email preferences – the last think you want for them to do is go hunting for your unsubscribe link. That’s how they might just give up and mark you as spam. Make it easy for them to come back – be sure to add plenty of links or big buttons making it easy for them to re-engage with your emails Use segmentation for increased effectiveness Just remember that that campaigns aren’t like your everyday campaigns. You’re essentially trying to jolt your audience to life, so the more the message or offer catches the eye, the better. And that usually means using language or an offer your subscribers are not accustomed to seeing from your company.
- On the point of segmentation, remember that you can segment your subscribers based on personas, purchase habits, demographics, email domain, last forms of engagement, or channels at which they prefer to engage. The rules here are the same for any direct marketing: don’t just send a mass “we miss you and want you back” email. Instead, use whatever information you have on your subscribers in order to create a personalized, one-on-one message. Email domain is a really important segmentation because each individual email client has unique email filtering options. For example, Gmail has the three tabs: primary, social and promotions. You can use reactivation emails like these to not only get your subscribers to re-engage, but also to drag your email from the promotions tab to the primary tab, which whitelists your email domain in Gmail. I’ll show you an example of this in a couple slides.
- And it’s not just about a personalized message or a 1:1 conversation, it’s just as important to communicate on the cadence and channels your subscribers prefer. Marketing automation allows you to isolate specific segments of subscribers based on how they engage with different forms of marketing. If you are marketing to millennials, they might prefer email and mobile communications. On the other hand, baby boomers might prefer a mix of email and direct mail communications. With marketing automation, you can even personalize your website so the messages and content changes based on the different segments that you identify. If you communicate with subscribers on their preferred channel, they are more likely to engage with your campaigns and reconsider connecting with your brand.
- Here are some tips for writing subject lines and body copy in your reactivation emails: Be different – Write in a style that your subscribers have not seen from you before. Be unexpected. Use $ Off and % Off – Studies have shown the some of the most successful reactivation campaigns use $ off deals and % off deals. Include “We Miss You” in the subject line – Your subscribers are not suspecting something so heartfelt to hit their inboxes. The subject lines that stand out are the ones that get opened. Get emotional – don’t be afraid to wear your heart on your sleeve here. Nothing feels more personalized than an open letter explaining why we miss hearing from you. And lastly, be human – don’t write a subject line like “we miss you” and then go into robot language copy. Give your emails a “human” tone and more sleepy subscribers will pay attention to your message. Now let’s look at some examples!
- Here’s a great example from Crocs. The reason I love this is the headline “It’s been awhile”. It feels approachable and friendly. And it makes you think, “Huh, I wonder how long it’s been…” It even feels like it’s just an old friend reaching out to catch up rather than a business trying to sell something. It’s much better than something like “Where the heck have you been??”, which feels sort of accusatory. Or something like “We wish you’d buy from us again!” Crocs offers a 20% discount to verify the subscription, which is an awesome way to jumpstart a sleepy subscriber back on the fast track to making a purchase.
- Here’s another example from BevMo. A recent Return Path study found that subject lines including a discount in the form of an exact dollar amount were nearly twice as successful as those that included a discount in the form of a percentage. So consider starting off your email with a “miss you” and an incentive just like BevMo did here. This makes your email highly visible when your subscribers are scanning through their inboxes.
- This one is particularly good. Not only is Kate Spade trying to activate a sleepy subscriber, but they’ve segmented to know that this particular subscriber is a Gmail email address. They’re asking them to check their promotions tab, drag the Kate Spade emails to primary inbox and ensure that all Kate Spade communications end up right in front of their eyes. If you have a large Gmail universe within your email lists, try to use tactics like this to make sure your subscribers are whitelisting your email address. You’ll also notice a reoccurring theme here with some of this language. Dating. “Let’s Stay Together”, “It’s Been Awhile”, and “We Miss You” is the perfect language for effective reactivation emails. It’s soft and surprisingly, it makes you feel like they truly miss you and love you. This builds trust, branding, and a greater tie to your company.
- One final example and it’s a Marketo example. We run reactivation campaigns here and this was our very first test into reactivation campaigns. Our audience was subscribers who had not engaged with our campaigns in 1 year or more. On the left, you’ll see our control, which was for the Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising. There is nothing different about this email in terms of messaging or content for a subscriber that hasn’t engaged in a while. On the right, you’ll see our test. The subject line for our test email was “First Name, We Really Miss You”. The banner reads “We Really Miss Hearing From You” and we use a sad looking dog to get the emotions going. And to use language that our email subscribers aren’t familiar with, we start with “Here’s the deal, Mike”. We let them know why we are reaching out. “At some point, you subscribed to Marketo emails. Ever since then, we’ve been emailing you our best ebooks, cheatsheets, definitive guides, and other marketing offers. But then we noticed something disturbing. You haven’t opened or clicked any of these emails in the past year!!!!” So far, we’ve provided context. This email then goes into saying how we don’t want to clutter your inbox with unwanted email and unless you click the big orange button (which you cannot see here), we won’t know it’s okay to keep sending you emails. So the takeaway is this: provide context, be straightforward, and ask them to re-engage with your emails. Otherwise, you might just unsubscribe them forever and no one likes missing out. Now let’s look at the results!
- We had a very clear winner here and it was our reactivation email! We saw a 70% higher open rate, a 325% higher click to open rate, and a 621% higher click through rate. I should also add that we called out the link to our subscription center in this email as well, so about half of the clicks we received were to update email preferences. I’ll talk more about this in a few slides but this is a very positive result for this test. Overall, this email reactivated 238% more subscribers than our control email. That means that we now have a way to engage our sleepy subscribers in a way that is 238% better than our normal marketing efforts!
- Step #3: Think Beyond a One and Done Campaign Running a reactivation campaign once doesn’t really do it for you. Picture this…every day, better yet, every hour, an email in your database becomes inactive. The moment that email becomes inactive, based on your definition which might be hasn’t engaged in 6 months, they should run through a reactivation series. Note that I say series here and not receive one reactivation email. Marketers need to make reactivation campaigns an ongoing part of their marketing programs instead of a one-off activity. Think about ways you can be proactive too. The moment you let an email slip into an inactive state, it becomes more dangerous to your email health and reputation. If you can start your reactivation campaigns sooner rather than later, you can catch many of those business risks before they occur. With marketing automation, you can listen for that inactivity window to be met, automatically flagging that email to remove them from normal marketing campaigns, and then drip them into the very top of a reactivation series. In this example, I have a three different reactivation series pieces. Let’s review what that might look like.
- As you drip an email address into the top of a reactivation series, you’ll need to define the cadence of emails and the key messages. In this example, reactivation campaign #1 has a series length of 3 emails. Each email has a key message of “it’s been a while” and in the copy, be sure to call out exactly how long it’s been. For example, “it’s been over a year since we last heard from you”. The cadence of these emails is bi-weekly: you’d like these sleepy subscribers to re-engage but you also don’t want to be too pushy. If a subscriber clicks on any of the three emails in reactivation campaign 1, remove them from the series and begin to include them again in your regular marketing communications. Even better, send them an automated thank you email the moment they re-engage, telling them you are so glad that they’d like to hear from you again. If a subscriber DOESN’T click, suspend them from marketing campaigns for a month and them drip them into reactivation series 2, which is 3 emails long with a key message of “We miss you”. Here, you can be a little bit more to the point and use dating style language. We miss you, we want you to love us again, etc. The email cadence here has changed to once a month. Why? As these emails continue to age and remain inactive, they become more dangerous to your business. They could hard bounce or they could even become a spam trap. If you email them on a more frequent cadence, you will degrade your sender reputation. But if you spread out the cadence, you’ll be able to maintain your reputation. And then finally, if no one has clicked yet, drip them into the final reactivation series of three emails with the very straight-forward message of “re-subscribe or else”. At first glance, this seems like pretty harsh language but you absolutely need your inactive subscribers to tell you if they are still interested in your communications. If they aren’t, they could become so disinterested that they mark you as spam or become a hard bounce or a spam trap, all of which can have a huge negative impact on sender reputation. Therefore, you need an answer to mitigate business risk.
- Step #4: Give Your Subscribers A Way Out Remember, one reason you run these reactivation campaigns is to determine who doesn’t want to hear from you anymore. You can identify subscribers who aren’t interesting with a message like “We’d love to keep sending emails to you, but we’re afraid you don’t love us anymore. And we’d hate to keep bothering you. Re-subscribe today or miss out forever.” Allowing someone to opt-out and unsubscribe from your emails is far better than having them mark you as spam. To that end, include a prominent unsubscribe button in your campaign message. And don’t be afraid to make it big and bold! The most important thing is that your subscribers can find it. If they can’t, the next best thing they will think to do is mark you as spam. Let’s see an example!
- This one is a little small but I’ll read it to you. Hotels.com says “We haven’t heard from you in a while. As a valued subscriber to the hotels.com weekly deals and specials email, we want to make sure we are meeting your needs. Please verify your email subscription to keep receiving great offers in your inbox” Then it gives you two options. A Yes button and a No Button. The No button is hyperlinked to the unsubscribe page. Anyone that chooses to unsubscribe can do so very easily. This is important because you don’t want someone who is looking to unsubscribe mark you as spam just because they couldn’t easily find your unsubscribe link. Another thing to note here is the use of color. Green for yes and red for No. This is EXACTLY how to run a reactivation campaign. Use colors that people associate with go and stop. I’ve ran a test like this before where I used a Yes/No button combo and tested green and red vs. no colors. I made the Yes button green and the Unsubscribe button red. I saw that by having the color variation like the email above, 40% more people chose to say yes rather than unsubscribe. Something that Hotels.com could have done to improve this email is offer a deal like 20% off your next hotel booked. Also, I would have made the Yes button larger and the No button smaller. Sometimes it helps to highlight the desired action you’d like the email recipient to take. What should you do if someone runs through all of your reactivation campaigns, sees all types of different messaging, sees a huge unsubscribe button and STILL doesn’t re-engage? Well, it’s simple: retire the email address for good or if you absolutely must, place them into a segment of emails with a very low email cadence. These folks are as good as cold at this point and it’s more worthwhile for you to invest your time on your highly engaged subscribers.
- Set Goals, Implement and Measure Establish Goals How many people do you want to re-engage? How many email addresses should be scrubbed out? Or maybe the better question is, how many emails are you comfortable scrubbing out? By what percentage would you like to improve deliverability, inboxing, and ROI? And although email deliverability is extremely important, the crucial part of this is your email inboxing and being able to measure it. Return Path has a great product that measures inboxing and Marketo has an integrated deliverability tool called 250ok that does the same. If you can improve your email inboxing, you will without a doubt increase your ROI on every single email campaign. Implement Define “engagement” and “inactivity”. Engagement and inactivity will mean different things for each individual company depending on your goals and regular email cadence. Determine messaging, offers, storyline, and cadence. The fun part of this is that you don’t really know what will work to wake up these sleepy subscribers, so have fun with it and try new and interesting emails. Measure Re-engagement is a success, not necessarily an immediate purchase. Think of it like this: a subscriber cannot make a purchase if they sit in an inactive state. If you get them re-engaged with your brand, they are then classified as an engaged subscriber and can be back on the path to a purchase. Lastly, unsubscribes are a good thing! You would much rather have folks kindly unsubscribe than mark you as spam and hurt your sender reputation.
- Alright, that’s all I have for you. Before I answer a few questions, I’d like to remind you that there is a brief survey after this webinar. Please take 30 seconds to complete it to let me know how we can make these better for you in the future. Now on to the questions! Does Marketo have an inboxing and deliverability tool to help me measure the results of my reactivation campaigns? The answer is yes! Marketo has 250ok, which is a deliverability and inboxing tool that helps give visibility into everything you could care about. There is a section of the tool called inbox informant, which shows you inbox placement across all email providers and regions. You’ll see an inbox rate, a spam rate, and a missing rate. And the tool using a seedlist that you would load into Marketo that can be weighted, so if half of your email database is comprised of AOL domains, you can weight the seedlist to give an accurate representation of inboxing. There’s even a report that shows you how you inbox in Gmail’s tab system. So it shows you what percentage of emails hit the primary tab vs. the social tab or the promotions tab. And one of the most helpful parts of 250ok is the design information section, which gives you screen shots and rendering of your emails across all browsers, clients and devices. I regularly use 250ok to check email rendering before I hit send. Overall, it’s a really great product. And if you were interested in other options, Return Path has an excellent inboxing product as well. 2. The examples you showed for reactivation campaigns appear to be for B2C companies. Is this a strategy that works for B2B companies as well? Great question! Yes, this strategy works for any type of company. The reality is that no matter what kind of company you come from, there’s a great chance that a portion of your email database is unengaged. And let’s think about it for a second: you already spent the money to acquire that new name. So it’s actually much cheaper for you to pursue reactivation campaigns than acquire new names. Where there is a difference between B2B and B2C companies is the email domain breakdown. B2B companies tend to have more company domains in their email database, so some segmentation strategies do not apply as well. But for non-corporate domains like Gmail or Yahoo, specific reactivation campaigns can be ran to drive higher inbox placement for those ISPs. Take the Kate Spade example that I showed you that called out Gmail and asked the recipient to drag the email from the promotions tab to the primary tab. That’s an effective tactic and can work for both B2B and B2C. 3. Is it better to have short copy or long copy in a reactivation email? This is a really great question. There always seems to be this debate about how shorter copy is better because no one has time to sit down and read a long email. But in this instance, I would say that longer copy is not a bad thing. You need to be clear and to the point but you can’t always do that in 2-3 sentences. My recommendation is to first write out why you are reaching out to them. They need to know that they haven’t engaged with you in x number of months or years and that in order to keep getting your emails, they need to let you know it’s okay to keep them coming. The most important thing here is to write in a human voice. Be relatable, friendly, and even a little funny. That’s how you’ll get the most people to re-engage with your campaigns. 4. I’m concerned that data quality is an issue for our team, meaning that many of our email addresses have never actually engaged. How can I resolve this? That’s a great question! The best thing you can do is to implement a double opt-in process, which is when a subscriber fills out a form on your website and you send them an email to confirm their subscription. If they don’t click that confirmation email, they won’t actually be subscribed. This helps ensure that the email address is actually valid. Now since there are already dirty email addresses in your database, I would recommend doing some clean up campaigns. On your end, you can look for email addresses that have very obvious errors like incorrectly formatted domain names or vulgar language. That’s usually where I’d start. After that, you can go to data vendors who have some tools to verify your email addresses. 5. Within Marketo, how are you actually able to tell if someone had a last engagement date? And how do you see they types of engagements? Talk about munchkin code Campaigns that listen for activity Campaigns that populate one field for last engagement And with that, I’d like to conclude today’s webinar. Thank you so much for joining me and I hope you learned some very valuable, actionable takeaways. If I wasn’t able to get to your question, I’d love to hear from you. Go ahead and send me an email for connect with me on LinkedIn. There is a brief survey after this webinar concludes and I’d greatly appreciate if you fill it out. It will give me an idea of how helpful this was for you and what you’d like to learn next time. And just to remind you again, these slides and webinar recording will be available to you later today or tomorrow. Thanks and have a great day!