How to Re-Engage Past Profiles

Author

Max Sturtevant
June 21, 2024

The Inbox Newsletter

Hey it’s Max from The Inbox Newsletter.

I get asked the following question a lot…

“How do you re-engage emails that aren’t active?”

Today, I’ll talk through it.

Subscribers Will Naturally Churn 🤷‍♂️

We need to come to terms with the fact that no one will be interested in your brand forever.

This is why it’s so important to be always growing your list and replenishing subscribers + more as some churn.

Put more attention on acquiring new subscribers than getting back uninterested ones.

The Reality of Unengaged Profiles

I consider an unengaged profile to be someone who hasn’t opened an email in 90-180 days.

If you think about it… that’s a very long time.

3-6 months of receiving emails from you and not opening a single one of them.

I won’t try to sugarcoat this one.

It’s very difficult to re-engage past profiles.

Like, VERY.

For context, if I get a list of 50,000 unengaged profiles and I’m able to re-engage 10,000 of them… I’m stoked.

The remaining 40,000 profiles?

Adios!

My Dead Simple Method for Re-Engaging Past Profiles

If you’re hoping I give you a magic trick that automatically gets every unengaged profile to be a raving fan of your brand, I apologize.

I don’t lose sleep over these subscribers who aren’t interested anymore.

They just aren’t interested, and that’s okay!

It’s more harmful to spend so much time and effort to bring them back when so few will.

And… if you’re sending to these unengaged profiles often, you’re going to hurt your deliverability and impact your ability to land in the primary inbox for your current active subscribers.

Only Send to Your Engaged List for 95% of Sends

It depends on the brand, but typically I will only send to a 120 day engaged list, meaning to profiles who have opened in email in the last 120 days.

If you aren’t in that group, I won’t be sending you emails and harming my deliverability…

Open Up One Send a Month to The Whole List

For most brands, once a month there’s an important email.

This could be a sale, product release, restock, etc

For one email every month, I’ll open up the send to the whole list, including unengaged profiles.

This will automatically re-engage past profiles without you having to worry about setting up advanced segmentation crazy unnecessary stuff.

Not many will open, but a few will.

Set Up A Sunset Flow

I also like to set up a simple sunset flow to unengaged profiles.

I simply create a segment that has the parameters that someone has opened an email at least once over all time but they haven’t opened an email in the past 120 days.

Then, I’ll set up a simple one-email flow to send to people once they join that segment.

The email is just a simple text-based email saying “Are you still interested?”

Let the customer know you miss them but understand if they aren’t interested and invite them to unsubscribe if they want to.

Bottom line… don’t lose sleep if you see tens of thousands of dead emails in your list.

Just consider them gone, and your life will be much less stressful.

It’s much higher ROI to focus more on list growth rather than fight a losing battle going after people who aren’t interested in your brand anymore.

I have a client with over 2,000,000 unengaged profiles we don’t send to.

Is it less than ideal? Yes.

But subscriber churn is just a part of email marketing!

Email Inspiration Of The Day

Brand:
Olipop

I’ve never seen a design like this that makes it look like the product is in the blog artile / newspaper.

Super fun!

Going to give this a try on one of my accounts…

Product Section Template #23

I’m starting this new segment in emails going forward giving a template you can use for a section of your email.

These will all be templates featured in my Mix & Match Email Templates product.

This one up first is Product Section Template #23.

This is a great section to use in a specific product highlight email.

You can highlight a few key points about your product and funnel the customer into a CTA at the end.

If you want access to a bank of 100 mix and match templates like this one equating to over 5,000+ possible email designs, click here » 

Reply to this email if you have any questions or further content you want covered.

Cheers,

Max

PS - If you want to join a community of 100+ members with daily tips from me, get feedback / support 24/7, AND get design templates that can make 5,000+ unique email designs click here » 

PPS - If you run an ecom brand and want to have a 15 minute strategy session with me, book a call here »