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.

The good news is that it’s super easy to add the address field to your signup form. Just click on the Lists tab at the top of the Dashboard screen. From there, select the list that you want to segment and click on the “forms” link.

Next you’ll 1. select Signup Forms from the pulldown menu on the left, and then 2. click on “address” in the Add a Field column on the right.

If you plan to segment by ZIP code often, you will probably want to go ahead and set “address” as a required field on your signup form.

First, you want to create a new campaign. For this example, we’re going to choose “Regular Ol’ Campaign”.

Next, you’ll be asked to select the list you want to send to. In this case, we’ll select the “MonkeyWrench Newsletter”, and then click “send to segment of list”.

When the drop-down menu appears, select “Email Address” on the left, then “contains” and then the domain that you’d like to send to.

Based on our list and the segmentation parameters we’ve selected, our campaign will go to everyone on the MonkeyWrench Newsletter list who has an aol.com email address. When you click the “refresh count” button, you’ll be able to see how many addresses are in the segment. In this case, the newsletter will go out to about 100 people.

Then, just select “use this segment” and build your campaign as your normally would.

You can use segmentation to combine parameters (like sending to anyone with an aol.com or a gmail.com email address) or to exclude certain domains.

To exclude domains, all you have to do is select “Email Address” from the left column > “does not contain” > aol.com (or whichever domain you are trying to exclude).

When segmented as shown above, the email will not go to anyone with a gmail.com or aol.com email address.

So know that I’ve shown you how to segment, you might be wondering why you would ever use it.

When you go to the Reports page for a given campaign, at the bottom of the page you’ll see “Email Domain Performance”. This list will show you emails, bounces, clicks, opens and unsubscribes based on your recipients’ email domain.

If you notice that emails were sent to gmail.com, but received no opens or clicks (a value of 0%) in addition to few or no bounces, you can conclude that there is an issue with sending to that domain. This will allow you to take corrective action for a problem you may not have otherwise been aware of.

For more detailed information about segmenting your list by domain, as well as some caveats and general food for thought on the subject, be sure to check out Mark Brownlow’s excellent post.

That way, when you create a campaign, you can send it to specific groups on your list, instead of blasting out to your entire list.

Now, most marketing experts would tell you that you should do this because it allows you to send “more targeted campaigns” to your customers. Targeted campaigns sent to small segments of your list will get you better open and click rates, they say.

That’s true, but here’s the real reason you should include interest groups on your signup form:

Writing an email newsletter with content that’s actually interesting to everybody on your list is a huge pain in the butt. It takes forever. It’s agonizing.

Sometimes you’ll have an interesting, timely bit of news that’s only relevant to a tiny 5% slice of your audience. You’ll want to send an email to those people, because you know they’d love it. But the other 95% of your list wouldn’t find it useful at all. So what do you do? If you have interest groups, you can just send a quick note to that group. If you don’t have interest groups, you just postpone the newsletter until you have enough news “for everyone else.” When you eventually get around to sending the newsletter (3 months later), it’s a big, long, 5-page honker that nobody wants to read.

Being able to send a quick note to a specific interest group will save you so much time, and that slice of your audience will love you more for sending them relevant content. In MailChimp, you can give your recipients a link that lets them update their own “profile.” So they can change their interest groups, email address, etc.

Example Interest Groups

Here are some ideas for interest groups you can use for your list signup forms:

Add List Segmentation to Interest Groups

If you’re a MailChimp customer, you can target your campaigns with interest groups AND list segmentation at the same time. For example, a grocery store can send a campaign to people subscribed to their “special offers” interest group, then use segmentation to further target to recipients within a specific ZIP code. It’s pretty powerful stuff (and it’s free). Learn more about MailChimp’s List Segmentation capabilities…