If you’ve ever received a subscription to a magazine, you know that as you approach the end of your subscription, you start receiving letters in the mail about renewing your subscription. And it’s never just one: You get a series of letters, all designed to move you to action. It may seem like overkill, but there’s good research showing that a renewal series is more effective at retaining subscribers than a single renewal notice. Renewals can get lost, thrown away, or forgotten in a pile of mail. Sending a series of renewals increases the likelihood that a subscriber will renew if he desires, or that he’ll make an active decision not to renew.

Keeping someone on your email list may not mean that you’ll see additional subscription or advertising revenue. However, if the overall engagement of your list affects its deliverability, it makes sense to confirm that inactive subscribers want to be on your list, and to remove subscribers that have lost interest. Plus, if you have a large number of inactive subscribers on your list, you may be spending more money on your campaigns than is necessary. The magazine-renewal principle applies to email lists, too: Email can easily get lost in a cluttered inbox, and sending a series of reactivation notices ensures that the subscriber is aware that his subscription is expiring.

To set up a reactivation campaign in MailChimp, create a new campaign. When you get to the list screen, segment your list like this:

Make sure both conditions apply by selecting “match ALL of the following”. We recommend that you target subscribers who have been inactive for at least six months. To do that, set the two conditions like I’ve done above. Member ratings of 1 and 2 respectively represent subscribers who have soft bounced and subscribers who have never opened or clicked email you’ve sent them.

When you’ve successfully segmented  your list, you’re ready to begin writing the text of your reactivation campaign. For the second and third emails in the series, you can segment your list the same way. Subscribers that have reactivated won’t match the conditions of the segment, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally sending them subsequent renewal notices.

What does a reactivation series actually look like? I’ve created a very generic series below. You’re welcome to copy or revise this text for your own reactivation campaigns.

EMAIL #1

Subject: Do You Want to Renew Your Subscription?

*|FNAME| *,

You signed up to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *. Would you like to renew your subscription?

Please take a moment to indicate your preference below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

<a href=”*|UNSUB| *”>NO, I no longer wish to receive email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

EMAIL #2

Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Expires Soon

*|FNAME| *,

We haven’t heard from you about your subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. If you want to be removed from our mailing list, you don’t need to do anything further. If you’d like to continue receiving news and information, please reply by clicking below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

EMAIL #3

Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Has Expired

*|FNAME| *,

Thanks for your interest in receiving *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. Your subscription has expired and you have been removed from our mailing list.

If you’d like to renew your subscription now or in the future, click the link below:

<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>

Sincerely,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *

Wrapping Up

As you can see, the first notice just asks if the subscriber would like to continue receiving email. The second notice acknowledges the first and only provides a positive action; the subscriber will be unsubscribed if no action is taken. The third email confirms that no action has been taken and the subscriber will be unsubscribed, while providing one final opportunity to reactivate.

Concerning the YES and NO options within the emails: The YES option can link to any page on your site, because simply clicking on the link will increase the subscriber’s rating to 3 stars and remove him from the inactive segment. Ideally, you should link to a dedicated page that thanks your subscribers for renewing. Note that you can’t link to MailChimp’s “thank you” page; the link should go to a page on your own site. Also, it can take up to 24 hours for member ratings to change after subscribers click the link in your reactivation email. The NO option should contain your unsubscribe link, which you can copy above or from any previous campaign you sent.

Regardless of the frequency of your normal campaigns, we recommend sending the reactivation series over three weeks, with one email per week. That way, you won’t overwhelm your subscribers with email, but the series will be frequent enough that you’ll keep the reactivation request fresh on their minds.

When you’ve completed the series and allowed a week for subscribers to reply to the final email, go into your MailChimp list and remove the subscribers that still fit the inactive segment.

Now, they’re shifting their attention to measuring “engagement.” They defined engagement as opens, clicks, and having an email moved out of the spam folder. This is similar to Gmail’s approach to leaving images on if the recipient knows the sender.

How Does This Change Things?

Hmm. If ISPs are starting to look at how engaged your subscribers are, how could an email sender use this to their advantage (beyond simple list  segmentation)? Perhaps you could send email a little differently through your delivery servers, based on your subscribers’ engagement activity? For example, if you knew half the people on your list were active users, but the other half not so much, wouldn’t it be smart to deliver the campaign to the engaged people first, then the others last? It would really suck to only get a small portion of your list delivered before an ISP decided you have poor list management practices, and blocked the remainder of your message.

Yes, MailChimp does all that. Automatically, and behind the scenes. That’s the reason we launched the List Activity Score back in March. We rank every single user on your list by their engagement, then we prioritize email delivery through our network based on overall list activity score. One of the many ways our nerds in the lab keep striving to improve email marketing.

Learn more about our List Activity Score

Related:
How sending to old lists will kill your deliverability

To be honest, I’ve never seen that warning, and have no idea what exactly triggered it. As you can see, the email was also sent straight to gmail’s junk folder.

On the surface, nothing about the campaign looks bad. The general content of the campaign is fine. The sender is not in a risky business (it’s a church). Their email delivery infrastructure (ahem, mailchimp) is fine. So what gives?

We ran the campaign through our inbox inspector, and got the following “spamminess” score:

Notice it failed Barracuda, Cloudmark, and Postini. It also triggered one rule in Spam Assassin (which, btw, is used in some way, shape, or form by just about all the other spam filters) that got 2 whole points. By now, we should all know how spam filters generally work, and that you shouldn’t use “trigger words” like “FREE!” or “BUY NOW!!!” in your content. But even when you do, those words usually only get assigned a few fractions of a point. Go to this list of spam assassin rules and CTRL+F for the word “FREE!” to see what I mean.

But when you see something getting 2 whole Spam Assassin points like this, something’s very wrong.

The rule that was triggered? The message contained a URL listed in the URIBL Blacklist. Upon closer inspection, it turns out they were using a URL shortener (you know, something like tinyurl.com). I’m not going to name names, but this URL shortener wasn’t quite as well known as most of the others I’ve heard of. No idea if it has a bad reputation, but if it’s new on the scene, chances are high that it doesn’t have enough of a reputation.

In general, URL shorteners are great tools that serve a good purpose, but spammers have abused the heck out of them to disguise their (already blacklisted) links.

In response, some spam filters make a habit out of “clicking” all URLs in an email, just to follow redirects from URL shorteners, and analyze the landing page they’d take you to. Which, btw, can lead to some unintentional unsubscribes, but that’s another topic.

If this is all new and fascinating to you, check out this article from Laura Atkins at Word To The Wise: Failed Delivery of Permission Based Email. She covers a few other seemingly innocent but oft-abused URLs that can get your messages blocked.

But it’s not just URL shorteners at risk. Any domain name with a bad reputation can get blocked. For example, there’s this article from yours truly:

Is Your Domain Name Getting You Blocked?

Finally, if you’re a MailChimp customer be sure to check out our built-in, one-click email checker: Inbox Inspector. It can help you prevent renderability and deliverability problems before you send your campaigns.

Matt Vernhout from EmailKarma reports that Gmail is now turning images ON by default, so long as the recpient has sent YOU, the sender, two messages in the past (kind of a neat way to make sure there’s a trusted relationship). Here’s the post from the official Gmail Blog.

There’s another catch — your emails to the recipient have to be authenticated (SPF or DKIM). As a reminder,  Authentication is a method used by many ISPs to judge whether or not an email is trustworthy (learn more at the Online Trust Alliance’s website). All major forms of authentication are built-in and automatically turned on for all your MailChimp campaigns.

As Matt points out, it’s almost worth it to get rid of any “DO-NOT-REPLY” statements you might be using, and actually encourage your recipients to send you emails. If it sounds a little too scary to add a “send us feedback!” link for your entire list, just add that for Gmail subscribers.

Here’s how you can segment your list and send only to your subscribers @gmail.

“Deliverability Failures Continue to Plague Marketers with more than 20% of Email Not Delivered to the Inboxes in the United States and Canada”

Hmm, if my math is correct, that means on average, only 80% of your list ever really gets delivered. Where does the other 20% go? Most just go missing. Yeah, seriously. It’s normal. Your mail man occasionally loses mail, so why can’t computers lose email too? It’s only fair. Some of the lost emails go into the spam folder (but not as much as you think).

Get your copy of the report here.

If you’re new to the topic of email deliverability, and you’re wondering what MailChimp does to help our customers get into the inbox, here’s a resource for you.

Domains signed with DKIM measured by Cisco

Point of the article is to say that yes, more and more people are adopting DKIM, so that’s good for the cause (visit Online Trust Alliance).

Juicy deliverability morsel from the article: “Google and Yahoo! have announced that messages with valid DKIM signatures, where the domain has established a good reputation with them, are less likely to be classified as spam.” And a quick reminder to our own customers that yes, DKIM authentication is baked into MailChimp.

In general, the more stars, the better your deliverability will be. So what’s your score?

Seriously, I had to wash my fingers after typing such nasty stuff, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror for a day or two.

In addition to the yuckiness, I typed in a bunch of stuff about gambling, and some phishing type content. And I made sure to use all caps, with lots of exclamation points (see why spam filters hate that).

Then I ran it through our Inbox Inspector’s Spam Checker tool…

Turns out I passed all the major spam filters!

My Spam Assassin score wasn’t great (anything over a 5 is DOA but I like to stay well below 3). But that seems to be because of other problems.

In terms of the extremely disgusting alt-text descriptions I used, they don’t seem to have triggered anything at all:

Got any questions you want the MailChimp team to answer here on the blog? Submit them here.

Learn more about MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector:

Blocks occasionally happen to everybody, so I told him we wouldn’t be immune. And believe it or not, ISPs have been known to have email problems themselves. What sucked about the guy’s situation was he couldn’t tell for sure if he was having a problem.

In MailChimp, if you want to know if your email campaign had troubles with any ISPs, you can always check your Email Domain Performance report:

In the stats above, 39% of all emails to comcast.net were bounced. It’s not a full 100% bounce rate, but it’s way above the average bounce rate for his industry. This particular user wrote me an email asking what they should do…

Since I know Comcast uses Cloudmark, I suggested they run an Inbox Inspection, because it includes actual scans using the Cloudmark spam filter. Then, they’ll know if it was a Comcast + Cloudmark issue.

If the email is extremely urgent, they could then send a followup email campaign (revised, based on their inbox inspection results) to their Comcast recipients by using MailChimp’s built-in segmentation.

The segmenting criteria would look like this:

since the user had MailChimp’s optional AIM reports installed, which tells you those who did NOT open or click (among other cool things), he could further segment his list like this:

You can see how adding the extra “those who didn’t open” criteria reduced the segment from 109 recipients to 75. Potentially, that’s about 34 fewer comcast subscribers who’d receive the followup email.

Two more tips for re-sending campaigns like this:

1. Open tracking (and did-not-open-tracking) is not 100% reliable. Duh. So phrase your followup email in such a way that if people get dupes, it’s okay. Don’t just re-send the same email. They’ll get really annoyed, and report you for spamming. Change your design (good thing you already setup those 7 basic template types, right?) and write some copy like, “our last message seemed to have some issues with ___, so we’re re-sending it because it contains some urgent blah blah etc.”
2. If at all possible, wait a day or two before resending. If your campaign caused a problem with an ISP that got a lot of your emails blocked, the problem is not going to magically disappear in a matter of minutes. If you impatiently resend bad content, the only thing ISPs will see is, “Oh, big surprise. Bozo the clown over there, who got more than a 0.1% complaint rate for his last campaign, seems to be trying again. Time to reset the un-block-when-the-complaints-subside timer.”
3. If the email campaign is extremely urgent and you can’t wait, you should dramatically alter the content (including the design and coding) of the email to reduce the chances of any of that triggering spam filters again. Make it a plain-text-only email. Put the content on your website. In the email, point to that page on your website. I’ve even seen some users micro-segmenting their lists based on criteria like, “First name starts with a, b, c, etc.” This will minimize your impact on ISPs, and help you spot further problems quickly.

Some highlights from the article, plus links to related email marketing resources from MailChimp, are below.

What’s the ROI for email marketing?

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is projected to return $43.52 for every dollar spent in 2009.
See also:

Tracking ROI from your email marketing with MailChimp

Case Study: $157,000 from one email campaign

Google Analytics Blog: Tips for tracking email marketing campaigns

How much email gets lost?

“A very small percentage of emails the ISPs [Internet service providers] handle is legitimate—90 percent of it is spam,” says David Atlas, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and sales for certified email provider Goodmail. Of the ones that are legitimate, email deliverability vendor Pivotal Veracity reports that roughly 20 percent don’t even get delivered.

See also:

Deliverability on the MailChimp blog

Check your email campaigns in major spam filters with one click

MailChimp’s List Activity scores launching soon

What’s the definition of spam?

“Consumers today see less spam than they’ve seen in the past,” MAAWG’s Stiles says, “[but] there’s actually more spam than there’s ever been.” But even if you’re not selling Viagra, spam is in the eye of the beholder. Some experts define it as anything a recipient doesn’t want; if the request was for emails to be sent monthly and you send them daily—you’re spam. “Companies will say, ‘But I’m CAN-SPAM compliant,’” Stiles notes. “[That] means you won’t wear an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs. It doesn’t mean you have the right to send email.”
See also: How legit email marketers can prevent spam complaints

Is authentication important?

David Daniels, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, anticipates that by the second quarter of 2009, if a sender’s address is not authenticated, it won’t just be more-carefully screened—it will be immediately dropped.
See also:

Authentication is related to deliverability

MailChimp email authentication guide (see which ISPs check for which forms of authentication)

Will Yahoo block messages that aren’t authenticated?