🤖 Automate a healthy email list

A healthy email list is the key to ensuring your newsletters land in your readers’ inboxes…but manually pruning inactive subscribers can be both time-consuming and tedious.

Today we launched several powerful automation features to help you build a more robust newsletter operation.

With the new features—you can build a fully automated re-engagement campaign to proactively remove dormant subscribers and keep your list squeaky clean 🧽🫧.

The result: boost the deliverability and engagement of your newsletter.

And I’ll show you exactly how…

Unengaged Trigger

Quick notice on terminology—“triggers” are conditions that start automations.

And we just added a new one to the repertoire: the Unengaged Trigger.

You’ll need to determine the length of time without any engagement (opens or clicks) required for a subscriber to be considered unengaged.

This will vary per newsletter. For example:

• Daily newsletters may consider readers who haven’t engaged in 45 days to be inactive

• Weekly newsletters may consider readers who haven’t engaged in 90 days to be inactive

Every day, readers who meet the criteria will be automatically enrolled into this automation at the exact same time of day as their most recent engagement (open or click).

Send Email

To be fair this isn’t a new feature…you’ve always been able to build automations to send emails 😄.

But for the completeness of walking you through how to create an automated re-engagement campaign—yes, the next step is to send an email to those unengaged readers asking if they still want to receive your newsletter.

Typically I recommend copy similar to this:

Branch Node

Now the Branch Node is a new feature we introduced today. It allows you to set certain conditions, and readers will continue down either one of two possible paths depending on whether or not they meet the conditions.

These conditions could be any sort of engagement metric or subscription attribute. You can even group multiple conditions together. Some examples:

• Are they a paying subscriber?

• Does their email contain “@gmail”?

• Does their acquisition source include “facebook”?

In this example for the automated re-engagement campaigns, perhaps you’ll give the reader 48 hours to open and click the email in the previous step.

So for the branch node you’ll want to create a condition checking if the subscriber has clicked on any email in the past 48 hours.

If yes—then they have technically been re-engaged and you’ll want to keep them on your list.

If no—then they have been both inactive for X period of time AND did not opt back in with your final chance email in the previous step. You’ll want to remove these subscribers.

Which leads us to the final step…

Update Subscription Node

The all new Update Subscription Node allows you to automatically update the status and custom attributes associated with a subscription.

For example—it’s common practice to append custom fields to subscriptions when they complete an automation to indicate they have already completed it for future use.

You can also add a condition to the automation trigger to filter and prevent people with said custom field from re-entering a similar automation in the future.

Continuing our example with the automated re-engagement campaign, you’ll want to do two things:

1. For those who did NOT click on the re-engagement email…

Use the update subscription node to…

• transition their subscription status → Inactive

• add a custom field re-engaged = false

2. For those who DID click on the re-engagement email…

Use the update subscription node to…

• add a custom field re-engaged = true

  • This will allow you to track these newly engaged subscribers over time

Tying it all together…

The purpose of the re-engagement automation is to proactively churn inactive subscribers and keep the quality of your list high. You set it up once and it’ll run on autopilot indefinitely.

1. Create a new automation

2. Select the Unengaged Trigger and specify the # of days of inactivity required to be enrolled

3. Send a re-engagement email encouraging them to opt-in by clicking a button

4. Add a Branch Node to send subscribers down either one of two paths depending if they engaged with the email in step #3

5. Use Update Subscription Nodes to either remove the subscriber from your list (via status → Inactive) or add a custom field to re-engaged subscribers

You can watch a full video tutorial on this below 👇️