Your re-engage campaign should be up and running now!

It’s widely recognised that it is more cost-effective for a business to keep its existing customers than continuously get new customers. Equally, it’s important to ensure people in your business funnel are interested in your organisation.

A re-engagement campaign isn’t just for your customers or lapsed customers. When you’re working in a marketing automation platform such as Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) you are paying for each mailable prospect record whether they are a Salesforce Contact or Lead or net new Prospect to the company i.e. someone that has come in through a website form.

Your re-engagement strategy should be tailored for unengaged Contacts, Leads, and Prospects, as these audience segments have different levels of engagement with your business.

Let's consider a re-engagement strategy for Prospects.

Scenario: Someone new to the business downloaded a white paper from your website 4 months ago and signed up for your monthly newsletter. However, they haven't clicked on any associated news article links or viewed any subsequent news pages since receiving their first newsletter 2 weeks after signing up.

You may have congratulated yourself on the white paper download and newsletter subscription, but if you haven't engaged with them since, it's time to consider a prospect nurturing campaign or a re-engagement campaign. Even if you already have nurturing campaigns in place, a re-engagement campaign can still be valuable.

Your re-engagement campaign:

If you are using Pardot for your marketing automation, you will need the following assets for your re-engagement campaign. Similar requirements apply regardless of the Marketing Automation platform used:

1. Campaign

   Use Connected Campaigns, No one should be using Pardot stand alone campaigns anymore.

   Reporting tip - As in this re-engagement scenario you are reaching out to Prospects they won’t have a lead or contact record therefore won’t appear against your connected campaign metrics, so you will need to report from the associated Pardot campaign or in Analytics Studio.

2. List

   Use a dynamic list to segment your prospect data to meet your unengaged criteria.

3. Emails 

   Get your best copywriter on the case or utilise AI or both! You need two emails, email 1 which is sent when someone meets the re-engagement criteria, and email 2 which is sent at a time period say 5 days after email 1 was sent and the prospect is yet to confirm their mailing preference.

   Content tips

   I personally stay away from email copywriting, there are complexities here, there is no one-size-fits-all as the tone, business selling points and audience are unique to each organisation.

   That said there are some fundamentals that I would include in the email.

   Personalisation - use personalisation, First Name in the subject line, and/or the opening paragraph. DATA alert - ensure the First Name field is clean, for the people you are sending the email to. Blank is fine as you can set a default in Pardot against First Name field but ‘not known’ ‘name’ ‘person’ ‘xxx’ are all examples of bad data all of which I’ve experienced in ‘personalised’ comms. In a B2B environment, you might also want to consider adding in Company Name personalisation and Industry personalisation. Data checking is needed here as well.

   Clear CTA - I would recommend a button and linked text for people to confirm their marketing preference.

   The date you want to hear back from them by, so you know when email 2 and then the subsequent data clean up can be applied and they know when to respond by.

   A reference to what they originally subscribed to/downloaded

4. Fields

   Fields to use for capturing re-engagement data.

5. Form 

   The CTA links/Buttons in your email need to link to a Form as Email clicks are an unreliable metric you can’t consider a click on the yes as an indicator that they continue to want to hear from you, they need to take an action.

   I would suggest a simple form with fields Email, First Name, Last Name, and Marketing Consent.

   Include a Completion Action when you build the Form to update the fields that you’ve set in place to use to capture consent/their continued interest. 

6. Landing Page 

   A Form can sit by itself and you can link people to that but it's very ugly, so place the Form on a styled landing page. Don’t have too much distraction on the page, you want the concentration to be on the re-engagement form submission.

7. Engagement Studio

   This is the automation program which runs the re-engagement campaign.

If you're just starting out with your marketing automation system or have had one set up for a few years, it's essential to have an automated re-engagement campaign in place. This campaign will help in capturing prospects at the point when your business determines that they are unengaged, and it's time to reach out to them.

If this blog post has sparked your interest and you need assistance in setting up a reengagement campaign in Pardot to align with your business requirements, feel free to reach out to me. Although I specialise as a Pardot freelancer, I can also provide guidance on how to implement this in other marketing automation platforms.