Wouldn’t it be great if you could re-engage your hard-earned email list without having to risk your domain reputation by playing “deliverability roulette”?

Regularly when you hear people talking about re-engagement in email marketing, what most of them speak of is either a Re-engagement Campaign (REC) or a Re-engagement Flow (REF, part of email automation). But are they worth the risk?

See, I think both regular REC and REF are important. Don’t get me wrong. Every subscriber is important to you as a store owner. 

After all, you spend a lot of time, effort, and money to recruit them into your list. Further, you need a list bigger than all your regular customers because the same people can’t buy from every promotion you send. 

The thing is, most of the time, you will be dealing with around 10% Open Rates for email marketing (or lower). 

As I said, either kind of re-engagement email is an important tool. But wouldn’t it be great if you could still re-engage your email list, without damaging your open rates like this? Well, YOU CAN.

One easy way to do it is simply by adding small segments of unengaged people into your regular campaigns!

By peppering your engaged segments with small fractions of your unengaged list every time you send a campaign you can engage with the unengaged. Keep these unengaged fractions to no more than 10%. 

That way you’ll largely maintain your open rates while pitching people who once signed up but have mostly forgotten you.

Here’s How It Works…

1. After running a re-engagement flow, copy off the profiles that are still inactive onto a folder in a storage drive. 
2. Select a subset of these records and re-upload them to your email list, labeling it Unengaged after Re-engagement Flow, including the flow’s date.
3. Then go into your unengaged segment, tap in the right-hand corner menu, Manage Segment, and click on Sample Segment Members. From there, you simply choose the size of the sample you want to create and voilá.
   
   
4. Select, say, 1000 records from this flow for inclusion in a segment labeled Sample 1 with the flow’s date in the title. Include Sample 1 in your next campaign send.
5. Repeat the sampling process with another 1000 records each time. 
6. Create numbered sample segments that each exclude all the prior samples until you’ve apportioned the entire unengaged list into bite-sized pieces.
7. Now all you have to do is start sending your regular campaigns to your most engaged segments and include the sample you’ve just created! And that’s it!

Don’t forget, the sample should be small. This is a slower approach than regular REC’s and REF’s!

The End Result?

You’ll get to re-engage small portions of unengaged people, one sample segment at a time. 

You’ll also get what’s considered “healthy” open rates for emails, all without compromising your deliverability as much as the regular re-engagement solutions will.

You may in email campaigns have re-engaged before, but have you ever re-re-engaged? Were you using email campaign marketing, email automation marketing or both?

Tell us your story in the comments below!

Leonardo Lima and Thomas McClintock, 

Hustler Marketing