Re-engagement campaigns

What a re-engagement campaign is

A re-engagement campaign is a short series, usually two or three emails, sent only to subscribers who have not opened or clicked anything for a long stretch — often six months or more. It asks them plainly whether they still want to hear from you, and makes leaving as easy as staying.

The point is not only to win people back. It is to find which addresses are still attached to interested people, and to stop sending to the rest. Sending month after month to people who never open is what teaches inbox providers to file you as junk, which harms delivery to the subscribers who do read you.

It is not a newsletter restart. If you stopped sending and want to begin again, that is an email newsletter, and the first issue does the reintroducing. Re-engagement is for a list still being sent to and quietly not being read.

The honest part comes first. Most of a dormant segment will not come back. That is normal, and it is not a failure of the copy. Removing those addresses is the success, not the consolation prize: a smaller list that opens reaches the inbox more reliably, costs less to send to, and tells you the truth about how many people are listening. I say this again on the call, because owners find the shrinking number uncomfortable.

When you need one

When opens have drifted down for a year, when much of the list has not clicked anything since joining, or when you are about to run a campaign that matters and want it to land. It is also the right job before moving to a new sending platform, because there is no sense importing addresses that will never open.

You do not need this if the list is small and you know the names. Write to them individually. Nor if the real problem is that nothing interesting has been sent for two years: then the list is not dormant, the sending is, and the job is a newsletter worth opening.

What I write

• The segment definition. Who counts as quiet: how long since the last open, the last click, the day they joined. Written first, because the wrong definition sends this series to good customers.
• Email one: the plain question. Short, no offer, no guilt. It says what they signed up for and asks whether they want to keep receiving it, with a clear button to stay and an equally clear way to leave.
• Email two: the reminder of value. Sent a week later to whoever has not acted. The single best thing you have published, given outright, so the value is shown rather than described.
• Email three: the goodbye. A last email saying they will be removed on a named date unless they act, and meaning it. This is the one people flinch at, and the one that works.
• The removal rule. What happens to those who never respond, and on what date, so the decision is made once rather than argued about later.

What you get

The emails. Each as its own document with subject line candidates, preview text, body copy, the action and the send delay. Plain and short. A re-engagement email that looks like a heavily designed promotion is more likely to be reported, which is the outcome the exercise exists to avoid.

The segment and sending plan. One page: how to build the quiet segment in your platform, how many to send at a time, on what days, and what to do with the results. Sending a large dormant segment all at once is a common and expensive mistake, so this page says how to release it in batches.

A consent and unsubscribe note. In plain terms: commercial email needs consent, every message needs a working unsubscribe that takes one click and is honoured promptly, and this series is a reasonable moment to confirm the consent you hold is real and recorded. Canadian anti-spam law sets out those obligations and I work within them on every list. This is not legal advice; where a question is genuinely legal, such as whether a particular consent still holds, I will say so and point you to a lawyer.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A specialist tool retailer in Saskatchewan has about nine thousand addresses gathered over eleven years through in-store signups and a competition, and sends a promotional email twice a month. Complaints have been creeping up and its sending platform has raised a warning.

The quiet segment is defined as anyone who has not opened anything in eighteen months, which turns out to be a little over five thousand addresses. The series is three emails over a fortnight, sent in batches of five hundred a day so the sending pattern does not lurch. The first asks whether they still want the twice-monthly email and offers a monthly option instead. The second gives away the shop's sharpening guide with no form in front of it. The third says the address comes off the list on a stated date. A few hundred stay, a few hundred more move to monthly, the rest are removed. The list ends at roughly a third of its old size, complaints stop, and the emails reach the inbox again.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How the list was built, what you send, what your platform is telling you, and how ruthless you are prepared to be. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of emails, the segment work and the revision rounds, agreed before anything starts.
3. Inputs. Read access to your sending platform and the last year of sends, so the segment is defined against real behaviour rather than a guess. Three working days.
4. The plan, then the emails. The segment definition and sending plan are approved first; the emails follow five to seven working days later.
5. Sending and removal. One round of revisions, then the series goes out in batches over two to three weeks and the removal happens on the agreed date.

What it costs

A re-engagement campaign is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the writing is a fixed amount of work but the segment and batch planning depend on the size and state of the list. Running it in your platform is quoted separately. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

The list is now smaller and honest, and the next job is giving the people who stayed a reason to keep staying, which is a regular issue people open on purpose. To stop the same drift recurring, new subscribers should get the first five emails while they still remember signing up. And if the people who stayed are not who you thought you were writing to, the next step is finding out who is actually buying. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.