Ep. 167 – FAIL! Your Re-Engagement Campaigns STINK! 🤠 GUY’S TRIP RECAP! 🔥 | Jay’s Scoop

Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that.

And today we're going to talk about something that is a massive brain drain, a massive time suck and drives me a little bananas. And that is RE engagement campaigns by marketers.

Marketers spend more time meeting about how to reengage old contacts than they do on how to handhold new customers. Or people who just went into pipeline or people that just clicked on an email for the first time ever. What is actually going on?

So I want to break down what I think you should actually be doing with your RE engagement programs and what is an epic waste of time. But before we do that, let's define what RE engagement campaigns are.

So specifically, an email RE engagement campaign is a marketing effort that's designed to reconnect with subscribers and people on your list who haven't interacted with one of your emails in a while. They haven't opened or clicked in six months, 12 months, a year, two years, whatever it is.

And the goal of these campaigns is to rekindle the interest that they had when they originally signed up and to get them re engaging with their content. And it usually involves sending special messages or custom offers or content to remind them of why they signed up. And to me, it is annoying.

So first, let's talk about on the business to business side, we just went through a series of tests. We have some really interesting data. So I know what happens. You're sitting in those meetings, right?

You're like, okay, you know, we have 40% of our database who haven't opened or clicked on an email in over 12 months. What is the campaign we're going to do to win them back, right?

And so you come up with these great offers and these compelling subject lines and all this nonsense, right? So here's what we came out with from all the research that we did. Outcomes of aggressive win back efforts. This is on the business to business side.

First opens and clicks from contacts who had not previously opened an email for 12 months.

So if you have a portion of your database who did not open or click on an email in over 12 months and you ran aggressive win back campaigns, what we found is that only 1% of those contacts entered pipeline the three months following those aggressive win back programs, only 1%. You know why? Because those people are no longer interested. They have a different role in their company.

They already bought the product or service that they needed. They don't like your content. That person, that contact is turned off by you. They are the wrong people. But here's the thing we found.

They're the wrong people at the right companies, right? You may no longer have the right contacts at those companies. So winning back that person is a waste of time and energy.

But here's the other cool stat that we found. Running an account based program, an ABM program. So you take all of the companies of the people that are not engaged, right?

All the companies that they're out and forget about those people.

Now you do a targeted program to new contacts and you could do this on social media, you could do a retargeting, you could do a whole account based program. So when you market to those companies, but you market to new people at those companies and you're targeting the same 12 month non engaged, right?

But you're not targeting that those old people, you're targeting new, new people. We found that 8% of these companies entered pipeline three months following. That's an 800% increase. So what does that mean in English?

It means that those original people that stopped engaging, they don't care about you, their companies may still be a very, very good fit for your product or service.

So you want to use that file, that database of companies as an ABM file, as an account based marketing file and go after new people that maybe have the right role and do that instead of it's a win back of the company, not the person. Now on the consumer side re engagement programs are destroying your ability to stay in the inbox.

Because what consumer marketers make the massive mistake of doing is they take. Okay, everybody hasn't opened or clicked on one of our emails in over 12 months.

You know, it's 100,000 people, let's send them a we miss you email, which is nonsense. You don't miss them and you send it out. The problem is the reason it's destroying your inboxing rate whether it's business or consumer.

But let's focus on consumer.

When you send out an email to a population of people that don't engage, that email send does horrible because everybody on that list are people that don't engage.

And what happens is because you did that send, it will actually negatively impact your IP address and your domain on future sends to anybody that you market to. So you never want to send a re engagement program, okay, in my opinion to just the population of people that are non engaged.

What you do want to do is piggyback your data.

So three to four times a year on the consumer side, okay, you want to take all your non engaged people and you want to lump them in with all the people that are engaged that do open and click and three or four times a year you include them on your best sends.

Maybe it's your holiday email marketing effort, maybe it's about some sort of crazy special discount that you have and you focus including them only those three to four times a year. And by piggybacking the bad data with your engaged data, it will not hurt your deliverability when you go to do your regular sends.

And marketers make this mistake to siphon off their engaged campaigns from their non engaged campaigns and that is a recipe to to destroy your performance. But in general, in general, let me take a step back. Start caring about the people who care about you.

If you never ran another re engagement program again and all you did was take that same time and energy that you dedicate to that and you focus it on your new customers, your new contact, the people entering your database now, I promise you you will be more successful. Stop wasting energy on people that don't care about you anymore.

All right, before we get into since you didn't ask, which is going to be my recap of my guys trip I just went on, I want to let you know that this podcast is sponsored by Marigold. That was me singing I love Marigold. It is my email sending platform. I send out billions of emails, consumer and business.

It is the best email sending platform on earth. Why are you not using it? They have a piece of content. It is brand new. It is free. The Complete Guide to Zero Party Data.

That is data that somebody gives you and they tell you exactly how to use it for personalization in your emails and everything. I am telling you this is gold. You can go to jschwettelson.com Marigold to check out the complete guide to zero party data.

And if you're in market for a new email selling platform and you haven't checked out Marigold, please go to meet marigold.com I am telling you it is worth your time. All right, now to since you didn't ask. So every year I go on a guy's trip.

Me and my six buddies from college, we go somewhere for three nights and we always, I don't know, we cause some Trouble. So I just got back. I had never been there before. We went to Nashville, okay? So me and my college buddies, we've been friends for, like, 30 years.

We went there, and I'm too old for this stuff, but who cares? We had a good time. So never been in Nashville. So if you've never been, here's what I can tell you about Nashville. First of all, it is wild.

I mean, there's more people there than anywhere on Earth. They have a million bars. I don't know anything about country music. It's not that I like country music. I just don't know anything about it.

I mean, I'll listen to if it comes on. I don't know anything about it. But in Nashville, on Broadway, which is their main street, like, every bar is named after a country star, right?

So you would go to Jason Aldean's bar. I know who that is. Okay. Then we went to Luke Bryan's bar. And I don't who one of my buddies, all in country music.

He's, oh, my God, this is the best Luke Bryan song. I'm like, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. Right? And then there was Miranda Lambert's bar. Everybody has a bar.

The one bar that actually knew the music was Kid Rock's bar. That bar was wild because it's like four floors and they play regular rock and roll music. So I knew that.

But anyway, they were all really, I mean, totally wild scene. I had no business being there. And then we went for lunch one day. The other big thing in Nashville, besides for country music, is hot chicken.

So there are all these famous hot chicken places. And I'm an idiot if you didn't know that from listening to this podcast. So we went to this place called Hattie B's Hot Chicken. Okay?

And so we're there. Me and all my buddies are there, and one of my buddies has a real sensitive stomach, and I'm a horrible person.

So they had the ultimate, hottest of chicken that you can get, and it's called Shut the Cluck Up. So I'm like, we're ordering that. So we order that, and we sit down and we all eat it.

And my buddy, whose stomach's not good, he ate it, and I was dying because he was sweating. It was not a good scene. And then we get in the car. We get in the Uber to go back to our Airbnb, and he goes to the driver.

He goes, pull over right now. This was so great. He jumps out of the car, like, almost While it was moving. And he throws up on the side of the road.

Now what did I do while he was throwing up? Did I say, oh no, are you okay? Let me help. You know, I took a video of this because I'm a horrible human being and I was dying laughing and. Yeah.

And then of course I sent it around to all of our friends. So I thought the chicken was great, but Hattie B's was great. Very hot. Very hot. And the, the problem with the guys trip is that it's three nights.

I by, by the third night I'm like, I'm done. I'm like, I want to go back. Maybe the Bachelorette's on tv. Maybe I can go watch some sort of anything. But I was like toast. But I went out, I rallied.

But I had a 7am flight the next day. So it is just, I don't know, I got to trim this down to two nights instead of three nights. But Nashville, I give it a major thumbs up. Sadly.

We pick out of a hat. Who's going to be in charge the next year? And you pick location and restaurants, everything. And they picked my name.

So I haven't gotten to where we're going to go, but I'm in charge for next year. You're going to off to send me your ideas and I'm going to probably have to avoid hot chicken. But that's what happened.

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