Stop Sending Re-Engagement Campaigns: Make Engagement a Daily Practice with Audience Management

Every email marketer has an unengaged file, and, typically, those unengaged files end up being pretty large in comparison to the engaged files.

Why? How did we get here? And how can we decrease the number of unengaged contacts?

How did unengaged files get so big?

There are two primary reasons for today’s inflated unengaged files:

1. Marketers use Open Rate as criteria for engagement.
2. Consumers don’t engage with brands all the time.

Open Rate is a metric email marketers have used since the early days of email marketing reporting, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most reliable. And even if an email marketer knows the Open Rate metric isn’t as critical as it once was, many ESPs use Open Rate as a default metric to measure engagement for segmentation.

At the same time, consumers won’t interact with a brand constantly. Brands with a longer sales cycle are keenly aware of this, but those with shorter sales cycles might not be as used to the lag in engagement.

In the end, these larger than life unengaged or inactive files were the root cause for today’s re-engagement campaigns.

How to engage “unengaged” contacts

In our recent Fireside Chat, Dela Quist, CMO at Alchemy Worx, spoke on how to use audience management to keep your customers from becoming unengaged.

His solution of choice is Audience Management – you can learn more about Audience Management and calculate its potential ROI for your business with this handy calculator.

While Audience Management is a stellar long term solution for those who may just be starting out or have smaller unengaged files, those of you with larger unengaged files or who simply want to figure out who to mail to can invest in Open Data and Email Activity Metrics.

Open Data and Email Activity Metrics are great solutions that give you insight into the actual activity of a given inbox. For example, someone may be in your unengaged file but they’re active in their inbox with other brands. This means there’s still potential for engagement, it’s just about reaching them with the right message at the right time.

Open Data and Email Activity Metrics provide you with these signals to help inform your ongoing engagement strategy, and they’re especially useful as we head into the Apple iOS 15 update impacting Apple Mail and open rates …

What to do about Apple’s iOS 15 Open Rate removal …

On a final note with Apple’s recent announcement about changes to its iOS features in Apple Mail, there’s no doubt this change will impact the reliability of open data. Therefore, marketers will need to use other metrics to determine how successful the campaigns are and look at alternative methods for measuring the overall health of their file, such as Email Validation.

To speak with a member of the TowerData team and learn how to bring quarterly Email Validation to your brand, click the link below!