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How to Use Reactivate
How to Use Reactivate
Updated over a week ago

Reactivate allows you to safely grow your active list by re-engaging dormant emails. This will result in higher open counts and traffic volumes from your email marketing efforts. This article will tell you everything you need to know about using this product.

What is Reactivate?

This tool is a feature of R! that lets you upload a CSV of unengaged or dormant emails into our app. We then process that file against our email activity data base and return all matching records with their last open and click timestamp. We will also tell you if any given email address is a known spam trap.

How does it work?

R! observes 1,600,000,000 email activity signals every single day. These signals are fed into R! from our massive publisher network.

Why does this help me?

We all know that the cost of acquiring a new customer is inevitably higher than selling to an existing one. Over time, a portion of your email list fatigues - people stop opening and clicking or otherwise engaging with your emails. But you worked hard to get those subscribers and simply removing them from your list is a lost opportunity. Re-engagement campaigns are meant to do just that: re-engage these contacts in creative ways to bring them back to life as an active subscriber, which will ultimately drive more conversions.

The risk you face in sending to a large list of dead email addresses lies in deliverability. As this portion of your list ages, the higher the chance that your list contains inactive accounts or spam traps.

“Spam traps are email addresses used by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blocklist operators to identify senders who aren't following email best practices. These spam trap email addresses may have been legitimate at one time, but are now abandoned or invalid.

For example, if one of your contacts got a job at a new company, their old work email address would become invalid. Any contact that hasn't opened or clicked an email from you in over a year could be a spam trap and should be removed from your contact lists.”

Additionally, any email campaign that you send to a dormant list is likely to have a relatively low open and click rate. Typically, your ESP (email service provider) likes to see benchmark engagement on email sends for open and click rates, so too-frequent sending to dormant lists can cause issues for and with your ESP.

Reactivate helps you mitigate all of these risks by identifying spam traps and known openers/clickers. By sending to a targeted segment of known active openers and clickers, you can prioritize sending recently active leads to increase the performance of your re-engagement campaigns while minimizing deliverability risk.

Getting Started

Segment unengaged subscribers

  1. Create a segment of your dormant emails in your ESP to load into R! Reactivate. We recommend the following considerations:

    • Emails that have clicked in the last 360 days, but have not opened in the last 60 days

    • Emails that have opened in the last 180 days, but have not opened in the last 60 days

    • Emails that have opened 3+ in their lifetime, but have not opened in the last 60 days

2. Once the segments are created, export and combine them into a single CSV file* of email addresses; remove ALL columns other than email address (make sure the email column is labeled "Email") and Save. This file can be plain text emails OR MD5 hashes.

*Note: By default, Excel will save CSV files in a 'CSV UTF-8 (comma delimited) (.csv)' format—which will not work with Reactivate. You will need to change that to save the CSV file as a basic 'Comma Separated Values (.csv)' file format.

Using Reactivate

Upload a CSV file

1. From your Retention.com dashboard, click Reactivate in the left-hand navigation. If you are out of credits—or want to get started—click to Contact Sales.

2. If you already have credits, import your CSV file by dragging and dropping the file into the Drag and Drop area. The CSV file must be of plain-text or MD5 email addresses. The file should contain only one column labeled "email" or "MD5" depending on which you're using. The maximum file size is 500MB, so you will need to break the CSV into multiple files if it exceeds that limit.

Reminder: By default, Excel will save CSV files in a 'CSV UTF-8 (comma delimited) (.csv)' format—which will not work with Reactivate. You will need to change that to save the CSV file as a basic 'Comma Separated Values (.csv)' file format.

3. Drag and drop the CSV file. Your file will begin processing, and a downloadable CSV will be available in the system as well as emailed to you after processing finishes.

Download the updated CSV File

1. After the file processes, it will appear at the bottom of the screen with the date it was uploaded, number of records in the file, number of those that were matched, file name, and the status. It will also be emailed to you. Download your file.

Note: A "Complete" status means the file successfully uploaded. An "Invalid File" status means there's an issue in the file. Check to make sure the file is one column of emails or MD5s only and that there are no non UTF-8 characters in the file.

You can also click the arrows to toggle between date ranges.

2. Open the downloaded CSV file. The results you'll receive will include the email addresses or MD5s (whichever was originally uploaded) along with the last_active, last_open, and last_click data that's available from the R! known universe of data. If any of the records are a spam trap, a Yes will appear in that column (you will suppress these in your ESP).

Note: If no data is found for the records, no credits will be used.

Results and Mailing Strategy

After you’ve processed your file in R! Reactivate, what should you do with the results?

It is important to note that a bulk send to the full Reactivate segment will cause deliverability issues.

We have created two safe sending strategies that will allow you to email these contacts in your ESP without issue. We recommend sending re-engagement campaigns on a regular basis. Whatever days during the month you mail your full engaged list, also schedule a re-activation campaign on those days.

OPTION 1 (Recommended)

  1. Suppress ANY email that is marked as a known spam trap in your ESP.

  2. Audience: Work through all the leads identified with an open or click signal over several weeks, prioritizing clickers and more recent openers first. You only want 10% of your total campaign send volume to be Reactivate emails; the other 90% should be engaged list members.

  3. Email Campaign #1: Send the same email campaign on the same day/time that you mail your engaged audience, or simply target your segment of Reactivate leads alongside your other audience targeting segments. This strategy of mixing in the Reactivate contacts alongside your engaged list maximizes the chance that the first email sent to the dormant user will land in their primary inbox and be opened.

  4. Email Campaign #2: Tee up a re-engagement email in your ESP to be sent to the Reactivate openers from Email Campaign #1. We have inspiration you can use here, but typically we recommend keeping the email short and sweet. Your goal is to entice the recipient to open or even better, click on your email, so a strong subject line and clear CTA button that is above the fold is a good goal. If you’re an e-commerce brand, consider building in a special incentive for these recipients where the must click to reveal their special offer or discount code and route them to a landing page on your website.

  5. For any lead that does not open campaign #1, you can continue to mail them along side your engaged audience for up to 3 campaign sends. If they have not opened after 3 emails, stop mailing them.

OPTION 2

  1. Suppress ANY email that is marked as a known spam trap in your ESP.

  2. Tee up a re-engagement email in your ESP, ensuring that the total volume of leads mailed to for this campaign is below 10% of your total daily send volume. This may mean you need to break up the sends over multiple days. We have inspiration you can use here, but typically we recommend keeping the email short and sweet. Your goal is to entice the recipient to open or even better, click on your email, so a strong subject line and clear CTA button that is above the fold is a good goal. If you’re an e-commerce brand, consider building in a special incentive for these recipients where the must click to reveal their special offer or discount code and route them to a landing page on your website.

  3. Mail each Reactivate lead 2 to 3 times; if they don’t open, stop mailing them.

REACTIVATION CAMPAIGN BENCHMARKS

  1. Open rates

    1. Great: 25% +

    2. Good: 10% - 15%

    3. Poor: < 10%

  2. Click rates

    1. Great: 1%+

    2. Good: .3% - 1%

    3. Poor: < .3%

Have questions? Email us at support[at]retention.com, or message us by logging into your account and clicking the icon in the lower right hand corner.

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