How My 10-Day Sequence Works

Over time, your email list can get a little… stale. People will subscribe to your list and they’ll stay subscribed and yet rarely (if ever) actually open your emails. And then there you are constantly emailing them anyway.

This hurts your open rates. Over time, this hurts your email deliverability.

Many times, I’ve watched email list owners who lament their low open rates. They may even blame the software they’re using and wonder if switching to another platform would solve their problem. However, in most cases, I found that they have not been maintaining their email list. It doesn’t matter what software you’re using… if you’re not maintaining your list your open rates will suffer over time.

Keep in mind…

The SIZE of your email list really doesn’t matter all that much. What REALLY matters is how many people on your list actually engage with your emails. The ones that are subscribed but never even look at anything might as well not even be there.

The purpose of a re-engagement campaign is to warm up subscribers who have not been responsive. It is a campaign that you should run periodically – perhaps even automatically.

Let’s go over that process and how you can build and run your own re-engagement campaign.

Why Email Engagement Is So Important

One time I sent out a re-engagement campaign and got some interesting reactions. The last email in the series basically tells them I’m going to remove them from my list. Why would I do that? More email subscribers, the better… right? But, he asked…

How much money or time has it cost you to have me on you mailing list?

Truth is… more than he thinks. And here’s why…

Engaged subscribers are what maintain high delivery rates.

If I have a number of people on my list who aren’t engaged, then it affects my overall ability to reach the inbox on everybody else.

How is engagement measured? Well, by many potential factors, including:

• Do they open the email?
• Do they click on anything in the email?
• Do they scroll through the email?
• Do they ever hit the reply button and talk back?

These are all signs of engagement with the list. If they never open, click or reply to your emails, then they simply don’t care. Chances are, they’re not ever seeing your emails.

The thing is, email service providers see this. Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo and other providers SEE email engagement across their entire pool of users. They see the email senders that people are routinely ignoring. And if you’re one of those email senders, you’re way more likely to have your email go into the spam folder or the promotions tab.

A large pool of disengaged email subscribers makes it less likely that you’ll be able to reach the people who truly want to hear from you.

Its that simple. Having long-unengaged subscribers stay on your list just to make the list look bigger actually HURTS the effectiveness of your email marketing.

The Basics Of An Email Re-Engagement Campaign

The basic goal of a re-engagement campaign is to send out a series of emails to get them to open or click on something. By them showing ANY signs of engagement with that email (usually a trackable open or clicking a link), we consider them “engaged”.

The basic process is simple:

• Segment out the people on your email list who are unengaged.
• Enroll them into a re-engagement campaign which you have pre-written. The goal of that campaign is to get them to click on something.
• At any point, if they click on something, we remove them from the re-engagement campaign and we consider them “engaged”.
• If they reach the end of the re-engagement campaign and have not responded to anything, we remove them from the list.

At the end, the people who have not responded can either be outright deleted from your list or you could segment them in such a way where you don’t email them anymore. We’ll talk more about that below.

Ideally, re-engagement is something you will do habitually. Every 60-90 days is ideal. You can choose your own timeline for how loose you want to be with your timeline. Ideally, you will automate it using your CRM software so that you don’t have to think about it anymore. If you do not (or can not) automate the timing, then just manually run the campaign over 60-90 days.

Re-engagement campaigns are only sent to people who are stale. People who are opening or clicking on your emails at least once every 60-90 days will never see your re-engagement campaign.

How To Segment The People Who Are Unengaged

The whole process begins with separating out the people on your email list who haven’t been responding to anything for awhile. Most email list management software makes this pretty easy because they track opens automatically.

I personally use (and recommend) FluentCRM. My screenshots and examples here will use FluentCRM, however the process is pretty much the same on other platforms.

With FluentCRM, the process is simple:

• Go to your Contact list.
• Hit the “Advanced Filter” toggle to open up additional search criteria for your list.
• Search the list for Last Email Opened before 90 days OR Last Email Clicked before 90 days. For good measure, you might want to also limit this search to people who are still subscribed since those are the people we care about.

You can change your timeframe if you like. In this example, I’m searching for people who haven’t opened or clicked on anything in 90 days or more. You can adjust this to 60 days… or go up to something higher like 180 days. It is up to you.

FluentCRM also has a feature called Dynamic Segments. This enables you to create a search similar to above and save it as a constantly updated segment. Subscribers will come and go from that segment depending on their activity. Here’s a dynamic segment I use called “Unengaged for 90 Days”:

Now, searching for this segment of people doesn’t really DO anything with them. You’re simply finding them. Once you have found them, you can either manually add them to your re-engagement sequence or you can tag them with something like “Unengaged” and then use that tag to trigger an automation.

Can This Be Automated?

Every CRM is different in it’s capabilities. With some, you can fully automate this entire process. With others, you will need to manually trigger the process and then it can be automated from there.

For it to be fully automated, your CRM software would need to be able to automatically trigger an automation based on email activity. It would need to trigger an automation automatically if a lead enters your inactive segment. Not all CRMs can do this.

However, even if your CRM cannot fully automate re-engagement, you can still set up the automated email series. It would be like a script that runs on automatic, but you would need to manually hit the “Go” button.

With FluentCRM, this is your best approach. FluentCRM does not (currently) have the ability to trigger an automation automatically based on email inactivity or by entry into a dynamic segment. But, what you CAN do is set up the automation to be run and then manually add people to it. If you just do this every 90 days or so, it would be like a routine maintenance action on your email list. Think of it like changing the oil on your car.

What Emails Do You Send To People?

We’ll talk about the basic “plumbing” in a bit, but the core of your re-engagement email campaign are the emails you are going to send to them.

Remember, the whole point of these emails is to get them to CLICK on something. A click is an intentional action on their part and it is something we can track with 100% accuracy. An email open is not reliable for a variety of technical reasons, so we cannot rely on an email open to show they are engaged. If you do, you could end up removing people from your list that are actually legit.

What kinds of things can we get them to click on? A few ideas might be:

• Links to your latest blog posts or other content
• A link to claim an exclusive discount or coupon code on one of your offers
• A “free gift”, bonus, or “thank you” gift for being a subscriber.
• Get them to vote in a poll. As in, ask them a question and give them two (or more) choices and ask them to click on one of them. Both links will be trackable.
• Give them a survey and ask them to click the link to the survey
• Tease them with a video message and then tell them to click the link to watch the video.

And at some point toward the end, you might even need to engage in a little bit of “tough love”. In other words, be upfront with them that they seem to be really quiet and not interested in anymore. Subject lines such as “Did I hurt your feelings?” or “Did I do something wrong?” might get their attention. And it is also a good idea to be upfront about the fact that you’re going to need to remove them from your list unless they respond in some way.

Keep your emails nice and friendly and in the same basic tone that you usually email your list. Just be yourself. But, at a certain point, you may get a little more serious and just let them know the end is near unless they click on something and show that they’re actually interested in hearing from you.

It is also OK (and very effective) to actually tell them to unsubscribe if they’re not interested in hearing from you. Be nice about it, of course. But, in the end, you’d much rather have people click to unsubscribe than not click anything at all. At least that’s a vote and a response and you won’t waste your time and resources moving forward. Remember, them being there constantly getting emails they never open actually hurts deliverability for the people who actually want to hear from you.

How Many Emails Should Your Re-Engagement Sequence Be?

There is no one right answer to how many you should send. Many list owners will send out one-off email campaigns regularly just to unengaged subscribers and they just do it regularly. Others will write a pre-written email sequence several emails long and let it rip.

In the past, I used to run a full email sequence consisting of 10 emails sent over a 14-day period. To be clear, I don’t run this sequence anymore and I think it is rather excessive. Attitudes shift. But, that’s what I did at the time.

DOWNLOAD: The full PDF of my old 10-email reengagement sequence is available in the Document Library if you have a ONEPass membership. Click here to view and download this PDF.

Today, my recommendation would be to keep it shorter. I’d say 3-4 emails is adequate. You can just mix it up using some of the ideas in the list above to try to get them to click on a link and show signs of life. In the final email, just tell that if they don’t act to stay active on your list, then you’ll be removing them.

If you want, you can create more than one different re-engagement sequence and have them sitting in your system ready to go. Then, if people end up in your unengaged segment more than once, they won’t see the exact same emails. You can mix it up a little. Totally up to you.

The Mechanics Of Running Your Re-Engagement Email Campaign

It is one thing to write the series of emails you will send them… and it is another to build the mechanics of making it all work. So, let’s discuss how to do that.

Keep in mind, every CRM can have different capabilities. There are also usually multiple ways to get the same thing to happen. What I will do here is simply show an effective way to build out the mechanics of re-engagement using FluentCRM.

First off, you will need 2 tags:

• Unengaged – We will tag people with this when they reach our criteria for being unengaged (for example, 90 days of inactivity). We’ll also use this tag to trigger our re-engagement automation.
• Stale – We will apply this tag if they reach the end of the re-engagement campaign without clicking on anything. This tag can then be used to exempt future emails from being sent to them and/or to know who you can purge from the list.

I would then create a dynamic segment such as the one mentioned above in this article. You can set whatever criteria you like. Mine looks for people not active for 90 days, haven’t opened or clicked on anything in 90 days, and still in the “Subscribed” status.

Note that you need to play with the segment criteria and make note of the and/or logic of your search. As you can see in mine above, I have two sets of rules (each using AND logic), but either one can apply (using OR logic). Also, the reason I use the “Last Activity” criteria, too, is that that catches people who may have logged into the site, bought something, or did ANYTHING on the site. Even if they haven’t opened an email, if they’ve logged into the site I consider them engaged.

The guts of it all will be the Rengagement Automation itself. Here’s the bird’s eye view:

This particular automation is built to accommodate the capabilities of FluentCRM. It currently lacks the ability to attach Smart Links to dynamic links (such as latest blog posts)… or to react specifically to clickable links within an automation. So, what I’ve done here is set up an automation which sends out a series of 3 emails. And then after each email, we run a new check to see if they’ve clicked on anything in the last 90 days. If they have, we remove the Unengaged tags and remove them from the automation. If they have not, it continues. If it reaches the end and they’re still in the system without any activity for 90 days, we’ll tag them as Stale.

In terms of the emails themselves, you can customize them to fit your needs. In my case, I make use of the Latest Posts block in FluentCRM to show them my latest newsletter issues, latest videos and latest blog posts. Because those blocks are dynamic, I know they will always show the latest content whenever I run this automation.

I also make use of buttons to get them to “vote” on whether they want to stick around or leave my email list. I use FluentCRM’s email shortcodes to make these links dynamic.

They’ll either unsubscribe or they’ll click on ANY of the numerous links in these emails. And, of course, if they click on a link, the automation will remove the Unengaged tag and stop bothering them.

To add them to this automation, we do the following:

1. Pull up the dynamic segment of currently unengaged subsribers.
2. Do a bulk operation to tag all of them with the Unengaged tag.
3. This automatically triggers the automation and the rest takes place automatically.

Then, when sending out email campaigns and newsletters, I just exempt Stale subscribers so they will not get it. If I want, I can delete them.

Frequently Asked Questions

This article is still being updated and edited.