As a data-driven marketer, I cringe at the idea of sending emails out into space and not taking advantage of the engagement data I get back. Knowledge is power, people! You can use what you know about how your subscribers engage with your emails to follow up with them – called re-marketing – and get the best return on investment from your emails possible. You can re-market to both engaged and unengaged subscribers in different ways.
Here’s a few of my favorite re-marketing campaigns to get you started:
Re-marketing to non-clicker openers
So they opened your email, but didn’t click on your bright, shiny call-to-action. Something piqued their interest, (maybe the subject line or pre-header text), but you just couldn’t seal the deal. Why not try another angle and re-market to them with a more enticing offer? Or give them a follow-up nudge to register for that upcoming event before it’s too late? Heck, maybe it was a lengthy email, and the most clicked link was at the bottom. Resend to those non-clickers, but move the most popular call to action to the top.
You don’t have to create an entirely new email from scratch; try to use what you know about the subscribers who did click on your CTA, and make a few adjustments to capture those stragglers who didn’t quite make it there.
Remarketing to engaged contacts
It's Marketing 101 (heck, it’s Life 101): You should always reward good behavior. If you know that someone opened your email, and clicked on your primary CTA, (and in a perfect world, you know that they purchased something because you tracked them through your eCommerce site), they’ll probably do it again. Reward your brand loyalists with a special offer once in a while!
I’ll challenge you a bit further – If you have a call-to-action in your automated welcome email to new subscribers, you should consider remarketing specifically to those who click through to your website from this email. These are your hot prospects! According to Practical Ecommerce, “Only 0.25 percent of new visitors buy — but if you can get them back to the site, your chances of securing a conversion go up 9 times."
Remarketing with targeted emails based on which link they clicked
Targeting and segmentation is an email marketer’s bread and butter. The more relevant (and more targeted) you can get with your remarketing campaigns, the better. You can learn what your email subscriber is interested by checking out which links they click in your email. Use that knowledge to remarket to them with timely, relevant email content.
For example, let’s say there are 3 different articles/links in a welcome email for new customers of a bank: One about Mobile & Text Banking, one about Savings Accounts, and one about Credit Cards. You can create automated nurture emails or series on each of those services, and then send to the contacts who clicked on the matching links! Voila – upselling in just a few clicks.
Events – nudge to people who clicked on registration link but didn’t register
This one is pretty self-explanatory – someone clicked on the link in your email to register for your upcoming event, but then either got distracted or just weren’t ready to commit yet. Follow up with them a little closer to the event, and include some additional details (or incentives) to help them understand why they just shouldn’t miss out.
The important piece of this re-marketing campaign is that you don’t send the exact same content twice. If someone’s already read your first email, clicked the link, and seen your registration page, give them different content the second time around. Like above: use what you learn from your initial email to improve the reminder nudge.
Re-permission / Re-engagement
Cutting down your mailing list size may seem counterintuitive, but the numbers don’t lie. If you have subscribers on your mailing list that haven’t opened your emails in a while (for say, the last 13 months), then take them off your list! Here’s why:
Inboxes reward senders who get more opens/clicks. If your list hasn’t been cleaned in a while and only a small percentage of your Yahoo! recipients are opening your messages, then Yahoo! is going to assume you’re a spammer or that your content isn’t relevant to their users. It’s their job to keep their users happy, right? So they don’t bother sending you to the inbox. Makes sense. The emfluence Marketing Platform makes it easy to run a quick search of your contacts and segment out those who haven’t engaged in a while from the Contact section, via advanced search:
Important TIP: Remember to include an “added before” date! Someone could have signed up last week and not opened yet, but we don’t want to remove them yet.
If we can find and remove the long-term inactive Yahoo! subscribers from our list, that engagement rate becomes instantly higher, and Yahoo! is more likely to put your messages into the inbox (not the Junk box). Don’t believe me? Here are the domain results from a client’s recent re-engagement campaign:
Before re-engagement:
After re-engagement:
We cut our list down by over half, but more than TRIPLED the raw number of Yahoo! opens!
Re-marketing is easy with the emfluence Marketing Platform. After all: Track, Measure, and Improve is in our job description. If you want to learn more about re-marketing to your email subscribers, call an emfluence account representative at 877-81-EMAIL.
