Email Re-Engagement Process

Keeping your email list healthy and engaged is necessary for your chapter's email marketing strategy. Low engagement can lead to a lower sender reputation and a drop in your email deliverability to your subscribers’ inboxes. 

You can maintain high engagement by removing subscribers who have a pattern of not opening, clicking and engaging with your marketing emails.  

We know it feels counterintuitive to remove subscribers when trying to grow your list. However, anyone on your list who is not showing interest in your content and has not shown interest in a significant period of time is not the right person to receive your emails.

A smaller, more engaged audience is always more receptive to your marketing efforts than a larger, less engaged group. 

To maintain that more engaged audience, you want to remove truly disengaged subscribers. You can ensure you only remove those who should be removed by sending a re-engagement email to subscribers who have disengaged and removing those who do not respond.

We wanted to make this process easy for your chapter, so we have created a step-by-step guide to help you identify the disengaged subscribers, an email draft you can use for re-engagement and a walk-through of the process to remove those disengaged subscribers.

Re-engagement campaigns should be run every six months to a year to maintain a healthy list. 

Identifying Your Disengaged Subscribers

You can use Segments in Constant Contact to identify who your unengaged subscribers are. Complete the process using the steps below.

Choose Contacts at the top, then select Segments. 

Choose Create a Segment at the top right and name it Disengaged Subscribers in the popup.

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Select Contact Details, then Date Added from the dropdown. Choose Between Dates and then select the furthest back date you can (12/8/2018) and one year ago (12/1/22).

Click on Add Criteria Selection and then choose Contact Activity. Click Has not Opened from the dropdown menu. Select Any Email from the second dropdown and in the last 180 days from the final dropdown.

Select Save and Preview at the bottom right to process the segment.

After you have processed the segment, you are ready to use the re-engagement draft in your Constant Contact account.

A word of caution: Sending to segments in Constant Contact can be glitchy at times. If you choose to send it to the segment, please confirm that it was delivered to the correct number of individuals after its send time. 

You can bypass this issue by adding the email addresses in the segment to a list called Disengaged Subscribers Date and sending the email to that list instead.

Constant Contact Re-engagement Email Draft 

A Constant Contact email template will be loaded into all chapter Constant Contact accounts on December 27, 2023. This template is meant to assist in re-engaging disengaged subscribers and identifying those subscribers that should be removed from your list. 

To find this template:

• Log in to Constant Contact
• Click ‘Campaigns’ in the top menu
• Click ‘Status’ in the menu on the left to expand the Status options. Select ‘Draft’. 
• Find the email titled Chapter Re-Engagement 2023.
• Make changes to the sender and/or logo as desired. 
• Send the email to your list.

Removing Disengaged Subscribers from List

When creating this email, we wanted to make the process as easy for you as possible. That is why the email suggests that anyone who opens the email and wants to be removed from your chapter list uses the Constant Contact unsubscribe option. 

That means anyone who opens the email and does not click Unsubscribe wants to be on your list. 

You will need to remove anyone who does not open the email.

To identify those individuals, go into Reporting for the re-engagement campaign one week after you send it. Click the number next to Did Not Open in the report. 

This pulls up the email addresses of anyone who did not open the email. Click the checkbox at the top of the list and then choose Add to List from the Actions dropdown. 

In the pop-up, choose Create New List at the bottom.

In List Name, add something like For Removal and the date. Choose Create.

Click Add and wait for the list to process.

Once all the disengaged subscribers have been added to the removal list, go into the list and check the box at the top of the email addresses. Choose Delete from the Actions dropdown. 

After you click Delete, you’ll see a popup with a warning about deleting your list. Choose the red delete button and your disengaged subscribers will be removed. 

Please note that these subscribers are deleted but not unsubscribed, so they can rejoin your list when they want. 

We hope you find this re-engagement process helpful in keeping your email list healthy and your deliverability high.

Please feel free to contact us at marketing@score.org if you need any assistance with this process or any other email marketing issues.

Thank you for the work you do for SCORE and businesses across the US.

Joanna May, Email Marketing Manager