We’ve talked about best practices for re-engagement campaigns here on the Bronto blog several times now. With the holidays in full swing and end-of-year reports looming, more and more email marketers are looking to get the most bang for their buck by targeting their inactive subscribers to reinvigorate their interest, and if not, to clean their lists of this dead weight. Bed Bath & Beyond recently attempted a re-engagement strategy, with this email (click to enlarge):
What works about this message:
- The subject line was “Julie, Bed Bath & Beyond misses you!” The personalization is a nice touch and the copy stands out from their normal promotion-heavy subjects.
- The message body and call-to-action is clear and concise: we’re confirming you are still interested in receiving messages from us, click the big “Yes” button by October 10th or we will remove you from the list.
- They give reasons to stay subscribed underneath with the heading, “Stay on our email list, and check out all these exciting features…” While it’s fantastic to tell subscribers the benefits of subscription (though I’d argue that “stay on our list” doesn’t sound too warm and fuzzy to a recipient), this information gets lost below the fold, and therefore loses impact. These bullets could have easily been part of the message body above the call-to-action.
What doesn’t work about this message:
- First and foremost, I received this message on October 11th, one day after the “deadline” to confirm my subscription. I didn’t click to confirm, just to see what happened. This leads me to…
- Since receiving and ignoring this message, I have received five – count ‘em FIVE – marketing messages from Bed Bath & Beyond promoting their holiday coupon ads.
What’s going on here? There are a couple reasons why this could have happened.
- Not enough people were confirming, and they back-pedaled due to low response and/or the reality of how many subscribers would be removed from their house file.
- Management freak-out. Perhaps this re-engagement strategy wasn’t fully baked, or endorsed by the management team, and it was aborted due to low response and/or the reality of how many subscribers would be removed from their house file.
- They realized the “deadline” date error and just scrapped it altogether.
- Human error. I should be suppressed but due to a mistake, I am still active on their list.
I’d love to know what answer Bed Bath & Beyond has regarding this campaign, and if any of you readers received this message or a similar re-engagement campaign and want to share, please do so in the comments below.
For more advice on maximizing your ROI via list cleansing and re-engagement campaigns, read this how-to guide written by fellow Bronto Email Marketing Strategist, Kristen Gregory. And Bronto customers: check out the Brontoversity step-by-step guide to using Bronto’s Clean function to do your own cleanup and re-engagement.
Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post!
Regarding your theory about “Not enough people were confirming, and they back-pedaled due to low response”: if I had run this campaign I would have probably tested it first to a portion of the inactive file to gauge response. After monitoring responses I would have made the decision of whether to roll this out to the whole inactive portion of the file.
That strategy is very smart – thanks for sharing!
This also begs the question of how do they define an inactive subscriber universe. Correct me if I’m I’m wrongfully assuming that as an email blogger, you’ve probably at least opened a handful of their emails in recent history… If that’s the case, why would you qualify to get this email?
We need to understand the difference between people opening our messages and not interacting with them further (hint hint, your content needs to be more relevant; you’re engaging a recipient with irrelevant content) and people just not opening them, period.
Good point, Juan. The account I received this is was my “junk” account that I use for shopping online, etc. I rarely check it unless I’m looking for order/shipping confirmations (as I am a lot during this holiday season!), and since I receive BB&B emails at my regular personal address as well, I don’t open most messages there. I’m betting they went off non-openers, but openers who don’t click are just as important to investigate and re-engage.
The other possibility is that they kept anyone that opened on the list and only removed those that didn’t open. Still another miss, but common practice. And IMHO not a bad idea, however the creative should have been changed. I like to give a yes and no option. Anyone that clicks no is instantly unsubscribed. (always make it painfully easy to opt-out.) Anyone that clicks yes goes back in to the main list.
Those that opened but didn’t click? That depends on the original criteria for “inactive”, the size of population, company goals, and a little intuition. At a minimum, I’d put them on a lower frequency. Ideally try a secondary more proactive re-engagement plan. Possibly survey them. Or just remove them.
Great suggestions, Brad. I like the big YES/NO button designs for these types of campaigns as well. A lot of marketers use the line “If you no longer want to receive emails from us, do nothing and we will remove you from our list” – which I don’t feel consumers can trust will actually happen… and as we see with BB&B, that feeling is well founded.
What incentive do you have to click “YES”? Maybe offer a coupon, discount or contest entry to entice the user to click? After all this a retail store so give the customer a little something for their time.
But the reality is the rate of email rot and how to keep your database fresh.
We are experiencing this where I work and it’s a touchy subject to those in charge. Do you send these out and ask your customers to do something or do you act on your own without the customer? We do remove users from our database if their email is dead but it’s a daunting task if you let it go for a while.
For a retail outlet I would know who clicks on our email links, who buys from those clicks, who opens the email, who doesn’t, who spends $$, etc… Then start the clean up from there…usually from the bottom since that’s where you will get the most “bang for your buck”.
Interesting points, Rob. BB&B outlined the benefits of staying subscribed (special offers, etc.) but no incentive. I’m sure marketers would debate incentivizing (free shipping, 10% off) versus not incentivizing, as the point is to reinvigorate real interest and engagement, not just drive initial response and have people drop off again once they get their incentive.