To best engage the contacts who you've collected from Retention.com, you will need to set up a specific welcome flow for them.

All of the contacts we pass you are tagged with a custom property: data_source equals GE

Here's how to segment for those contacts:

Properties about someone
data_source > equals > GE > Type: Text

If you wanted to set up segments for engaged and/or unengaged contacts, here's an example of how that would look.

Engaged

Unengaged

Note: You can use your current unengaged segment criteria to create a Retention Unengaged segment. Your Unengaged segment DOES NOT automatically suppress profiles. You will need to suppress those profiles on a regular basis as a part of your list-cleansing practices.

This flow acts as a funnel that you can use to determine which contacts you want to keep engaging with. Doing that will keep your deliverability in check.

From inside your email service provider account, follow these steps:

1. Clone your existing Welcome Flow and change the Flow Trigger to "when they subscribe to Retention." Remember: "Retention" will only appear after the integration is complete. If it has not been integrated yet, simply clone the flow as it is without changing the Flow Trigger—and then make the necessary adjustments.

2. Adjust your content. Your flow should contain three to five emails, and its content should reflect the fact that the contacts did not sign up for your list. These contacts are lower-intent customers, so it would be beneficial to add a special offer or discount for them, as well. (See the section below, "What to send your contacts," for more information and examples.)

3. Set up the logic. Set the campaign to fire immediately. Recency and relevancy is the key to a successful welcome flow. (See "Example email flow" below for more information.") The exact filters will vary depending on the ESP, but you want to set up filters that eliminate people who have started a checkout or placed an order previously. This is how those flow filters would look in Klaviyo:

That allows everyone who had started a checkout or placed an order at any point in this flow to exit it, so you will not send an irrelevant welcome message to someone who had already started a checkout, for example. Instead, they will enter your Abandoned Checkout flow or Post-Purchase flow.

Note: If you are sending Added To Cart or Viewed Product emails, create a flow filter to remove people who Added to Cart/Viewed Products from this flow. Here's an example of how that would look for Added to Cart:

You would do the same thing for Viewed Product:

What someone has done (or not done)
Person has > Viewed Product Reclaim > zero times > since starting this flow

4. Perform A/B tests. It's important to test your subject lines, copy, CTAs, offers/discounts, etc. to ensure the best results.

To keep your list clean and engaged, build segments for active and inactive audiences. Here are example of how to create those segments.

Active
1. 30-day openers: Has the user opened an email in the past 30 days?
2. 60-day clickers: Has the user clicked an email in the past 60 days?

Note: If you only send one email a week, use 45-day openers and 90-day clickers instead.

Inactive
The best re-engagement segments are for 90-, 120-, or 180-day clickers.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JZ3Y-_O6ckI

We get this question multiple times a day, so we thought we’d throw out a few examples of people engaging email-based retargeting contacts.

First things first.

The most important thing is that you contact these people immediately upon receiving the data.

The only two problems we’ve seen with customers who had problems with spam complaints came as a result of each waiting for over a week to send to the records. One was a beauty-related eComm company; the other was a political candidate.

Why would this happen?

It’s impossible to know for certain, but after running an ESP for 6+ years, it’s becoming clear to us that in 2020, it’s no longer infuriating to get an email from a brand that you recognize — especially if you were recently browsing their site.

What still IS infuriating is getting emailed by a brand you don’t recognize, which is what happens when you wait a week to email these contacts.

In “internet time,” a week may as well be a thousand years. If they hit your site once then leave, they won’t remember who you are unless you email them NOW.

Now that we know we need to contact these site visitors immediately, we’ll show a few examples of what our customers are having success with.

I love the way Twin Cities Summer Jam starts off their welcome email:

“Hi --FNAME--,

Thanks for stopping by the site.”

Then they continue with content that is valuable (presumably) to someone who would have been browsing their website.

Remember: Don't use language like, "Thanks for joining/subscribing/signing up," in the email, as these contacts didn't directly sign-up on your page.

Publisher Marin Magazine does a great job at both thanking the visitor for visiting the site, and offering them a clear chance to opt-out if they aren’t interested in receiving further newsletters.

We’ve seen many examples of e-commerce companies sending Retention.com’s contacts their normal welcome series and seeing prolific success.

Standard e-commerce best practices typically are:

One e-commerce example comes from our friends at LuckyShot USA, our first paying customer!

Lucky Shot follows it up with two other emails that are standard best practices for an e-commerce welcome series.

Here’s Lucky Shot’s second email offering a discount along with a friendly Meet the Team message:

And LuckyShot’s third email: a Discount + The Best Sellers.

The most important part is to just get something automated out, right when you get the data.

For e-commerce, we’d recommend putting them into a “best practices” welcome series. For publishers, media companies, and any other type of businesses, we’d recommend thanking them for coming to your website, offering a taste of what’s to come, and giving them an obvious way to opt-out if they don’t want to continue receiving your content.

To develop a one-to one-relationship with users and grow your audience, ensure you have the best email flow: