Refreshing Consent & Re-engagement

Keeping your audience both engaged and compliant is one of the most important keys to a successful email marketing program. Doing so ensures you’re reaching people that are interested to hear (and purchase) from you. There are three main steps to maintaining a compliant and engaged audience: 

1. Gain explicit consent from your audience and refresh that consent when necessary.
2. Periodically reach out to unengaged users with an enticing email to encourage them to re-engage.
3. Archive users that do not re-engage after receiving this email, removing them from your regular newsletter and one-time campaign sends. 

Re-engagement should happen continuously, but the exact timing will depend on your audience size, email campaign cadence, and outside factors. In this article, we’ll go over best practices for these three very important steps!
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Maintain Proper Consent to Send Emails to Your Audience

When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a very strict privacy and security law passed by the European Union, was announced, marketers everywhere scrambled to ensure they were compliant. Soon after, California followed suit with the California Consumer Privacy Act (‘CCPA’), which is a similar regulation to GDPR. It’s rare, but now that we know how to refresh consent, we’re prepared for if anything similar happens in the future.

It’s recommended to regularly check-in on marketing regulations changes so you aren’t stuck flat on your feet when a change in consent regulations does happen. 

Depending on the specific standards you are subject to, like the GDPR, the exact steps you need to take will vary. You may need to send a re-permission campaign (getting people to give their consent again), maintain a double opt-in standard, or store information securely. You’ll want to check the laws that are relevant to your audience, which depends on factors like your industry and where in the world your customers are making purchases from.

Taking these steps is important not only because it’s the law, but because at the end of the day, you want to ensure you’re targeting people who are interested in hearing from you and doing business with you. This is essential to using email as a relationship-strengthening tool with your audiences instead of it becoming a nuisance.

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Make One Last Attempt to Re-Engage Your Unengaged Email Marketing Audience

Unengaged audience members drag your KPIs down – it’s a simple fact. Re-engagement campaigns are a great way to, you guessed it, re-engage your unengaged audience members. Here are a few key guidelines we follow when running these campaigns for our clients:

Keep It Simple: 

• Since these contacts aren’t opening emails, we don’t need to spend a lot of time and energy in making these campaigns flashy. Keep it short and to the point. 

Grab Attention: 

• We like to use deals, discounts, or promotions in these subject lines and in the body copy to grab the attention of your audience, and entice them to click through and make a purchase. 
• Since this audience is less likely to engage and to purchase, you can go with a higher-value promo than you typically would to really grab attention.
• Put your promo (or at least tease it) in the subject line to get as many opens as possible for this campaign.

Send Only to Un-Engaged Members: 

• You’ll want to narrow this down as much as possible, depending on your audience and your goals. This will usually mean sending only to people that haven’t engaged with your emails for 6 or 12 months, though it will vary depending on how much you’re looking to trim down your audience. 

There are a few ways to go about this, and your platform is a great place to start. At Good & Gold, we use MailChimp and Klaviyo, both of which have great templates for creating an email and a relevant segment as a jumping off point.

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Remove Un-Engaged Users That Do Not Engage with Your Last Attempt to Reach Out

Your final step will be to archive (or “sunset”) users that don’t engage, even after you send that super-enticing last campaign. Those who do not interact with emails for a prolonged period of time are unlikely to start engaging again and will drag down your KPIs, so it’s best to part ways on good terms! Some platforms have this worked into the automated flow, and some require a manual process – you’ll want to check with your specific platform for their recommended best practices on how to do this.

Remember, staying compliant and maintaining an engaged audience results in a happy audience that’s more likely to make purchases – and that means a happy marketing team and a growing business! It’s a win-win…win!

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