Streamline your marketing strategy with a reconfirmation campaign

Building your mailing list and continuously adding new prospects is essential to the success of any marketing strategy. Once mailing lists are established, the next challenge for marketers is to maintain and clean them to ensure maximum email deliverability for marketing campaigns. Whilst it might seem counter-intuitive to remove subscribers from lists, this can be the best way to maximise the number of successfully delivered emails.

Through a reconfirmation email, or re-opt-in email, campaign marketers can remind unengaged users about their business, and also clean up their mailing list without impacting on delivery rates. Importantly, such a campaign will prevent your business from inadvertently spamming customers.

There are many reasons why marketing emails may end up in the spam box. Firstly, emails to abandoned addresses become undeliverable, and subsequent sending results in bounces.  Recipients who once actively opted-in to emails may no longer be interested in their content, and may mark them as spam, especially when no easy opt-out method is indicated. This reduces email deliverability and prevents digital marketing strategies from performing at 100%.

Sending re-opt-in messages is a good way of preventing these problems and improving the deliverability of marketing emails.

There are a few simple ways to construct an effective reconfirmation email. Firstly, provide a link that allows your clients to re-confirm their opt-in as well as a link that allows users to unsubscribe. If there are recipients that do not engage, delete them from the mailing list.

If the subscriber does not explicitly opt back in after receiving this email, it is best to assume that they no longer wish to receive the content, and their addresses should be removed from the mailing list.

Secondly, it is important to remind the recipient how their address came to be on your mailing list.

Generally, reconfirmation emails should be in HTML/plain and plain/text format. This is because some recipient domains do not view HTML emails and will only see plain/text emails.

Finally, for sizeable mailing lists, it might be preferable to send re-opt-in email campaigns in batches to avoid issues with recipient domains.

Remember quality over quantity for a successful email campaign. 

Marketers should use tools to track unengaged users, as they are the best targets for re-confirmation emails. It is even possible to create re-confirmation emails that are specific to a particular segment of your list, if address lists are set up in this fashion.

Often, the best advice is to send re-opt-in messages to subscribers who have not logged into their account or clicked on an email in the last 3-6 months. Whilst this does not appear a very long period of time, it is surprising how quickly recipients can lose interest in content. 

Of course, this timeframe does not work for everyone.  Ultimately, the more frequently businesses clean their address lists, the less likely it is that they will have deliverability problems related to old lists.

Ultimately, re-confirmation campaigns are a win-win as part of any marketing strategy; they remind recipients of your services, help track recipient engagement, and help maintain a clean mailing list.

 

About SendGrid:

SendGrid is a cloud-based email service that delivers marketing, transactional and enterprise emails on behalf of companies. Built upon the world’s largest email delivery infrastructure, SendGrid’s solutions provide customers with the industry’s best reliability, scalability and email deliverability.

SendGrid’s API makes custom integration quick and easy for businesses looking to eliminate the need to build, scale and maintain the infrastructure in-house. Actionable real-time analytics on transactional and marketing email campaigns help businesses large and small make the right business decisions.

Thousands of companies use SendGrid’s platform to deliver billions of transactional and marketing emails every month, these include Airbnb, BookingBug, Foursquare, Maplin, Pinterest, Spotify and Twilio. For more information, visit www.sendgrid.com.

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