How to Improve Email Delivery Rates with a 4-Week Re-engagement Campaign
If you’ve been building your email list for a while, you may have noticed that as your email list grows, your open and click-through rates go down. This is normal because some people are only looking for free information and maybe they got what they needed out of your initial free offer. That’s okay! A certain percentage of those people will remain at the top of your funnel and never invest in your offers. The remaining people on your list may need additional incentive to open your emails, so using a re-engagement campaign can be very effective for getting your subscribers interested in your content again.
When you use this strategy, you can re-engage the people who are already on your list, build your email deliverability credibility with the different email platforms, and possibly get your subscribers excited about your offers all over again.
In this episode, we’re diving into how you can use an email re-engagement campaign in your business.
How email delivery works and how to train your subscribers to click links to improve open rates
There is a fine line between giving enough information in your emails to make them valuable and interesting to your subscribers vs. giving it all away so there is no need for them to click the link, (the link being whatever call to action you are sharing with them in that particular email).
That means that you need to be strategic when deciding what to include in your email. Over time, your subscribers will become familiar with your style and be conditioned, or trained, to click the link to learn more. That’s you overall goal. When they love your content, they’ll always be curious to see what’s included in your most recent email.
Each time someone opens your email and clicks the link inside, it’s sending information out into the internet that says your content is desirable and interesting. That establishes credibility for you with the email delivery services and that’s a good thing.
What a re-engagement campaign is and how it works
A re-engagement campaign is a series of emails delivered over a number of days, or weeks, with the express purpose of getting your subscribers to engage, (specifically clicking a link). You’re ultimately training them that your content is valuable and clicking a link is beneficial to them.
When Karen did this for her list, she drafted 4 emails that were sent over the course of a month on 4 consecutive Saturdays. Each email was broken down into a specific category or topic and each email included four free pieces of free content.
Her email categories were:
Client Attraction
Client Conversion
Revenue Generation
Business Setup
She also sent one announcement email before the re-engagement campaign letting her list know what was coming and when to keep an eye out for it. The announcement email was designed to build excitement and enticement for what was coming.
Putting the pieces into place:
- Choose content for each week (4 weeks in total)
- Feel free to use pdfs, checklists, resource lists, livestreams, blogs, podcast episodes, etc. Basically, any content that can be accessed by a single click. I included 4 resources in each email that included previous livestream trainings, workbooks, guides, checklists, etc.
- Write delivery emails
- The emails are pretty basic as the main goal is to spotlight the content and links that you’re sharing. Draft a brief introduction of that week’s topic and then list the resources that you’re sharing with the appropriate clickable links.
- Tease what’s coming the following week
- As you wrap up each email be sure to share what they can expect the following week. In essence, you’re teasing what is coming next as a way of piquing their interest and getting them excited for the following week.
- CTA (call to action) in each email
- The call to action for each email is to instruct them to click a link, or multiple links, to gain access to the information you’re sharing.
Review analytics, (specifically click through rate vs. open rate)
Tracking your data is the only way to know if something is working. Our recommendation is to establish a baseline by documenting the click through rates and for the most recent 4 emails that you sent prior to the campaign. Prior to the IOS14 update we also tracked open rates but the reliability of that information within your email management system is not accurate so now we rely strictly on click through rates as our main metric.
Back in 2021, when Apple released its Apple Mail Privacy Protection, it made it impossible to get accurate open rates. Basically, Apple Mail now ‘pre-fetches’ content in emails, which downloads whether the email is opened or not. This means everyone using Apple software will show a 100% open rate, even if they don’t open the email! So, this means your reporting will show a higher number of opens that are actually happening that’s why a click through rate is our metric of choice.
As you send the re-engagement emails, document the click through rates for each of the five campaign emails.
Next, analyze the data. To confirm that you have re-engaged your audience be sure to track the 5 emails that you sent after the campaign ends. Meaning you document the click through rates for each email.
We did some research on industry standards and in an article from Smart Insights they report that an average click through rate across all industries is 1.4%.
In the health and wellness space the average click through rate is 1%.
In an article posted 1.23.24 by Dripify.com they reported that the average click through rate across all industries is 2.3% with Campaign Source being their resource.
As you can tell, there is a range even within what the experts are reporting so it’s always a great idea to track your own data.
So, now it’s time to look at your results. Has there been an improvement? Have you seen an uptick in click through rates?
Once you run this campaign the first time you will be able to rinse & repeat it very easily with minor tweaks. Our recommendation is to run a re-engagement campaign two times per year.
