Landing new subscribers to receive your brand’s email messaging is a great, valuable accomplishment – and we see brands undercutting that accomplishment all too often with poor email strategy.

I’ve already covered how to set up initial campaigns to bring in new subscribers and how to tune up the acquisition process once the data starts coming in. Now let’s talk about how to build email marketing campaigns that keep the right users engaged and sift the rest out before they tank your performance and send you right into spam folders.

The DMi CRM and Email team’s overarching mantra is “send the right message, to the right subscriber, at the right time.” In this post, I’ll share how this mission is reflected in three big facets of email campaigns: cadence, content, and user segmentation.

Ready to turn up the ROI on your subscriber base? Keep reading.

Email cadence tips and best practices

Once a new subscriber hits your system, you should aim to send the welcome email as quickly as possible – in other words, as close to real time as you can get. The longer the delay, the more likely the user will be to forget that they subscribed, and the less likely they’ll be to engage. Strike while the iron is hot!

(This should be just the first of many automated emails this subscriber will receive – more on automations in a bit.)

The first email is just the opening in a full welcome series, which we recommend will consist of 3 to 5 emails over the first 5 to 7 days after subscription. As a starting point, use one-day intervals between each email, although you should continuously test and optimize to find the best-performing wait times as you go.

That welcome series represents enough chances for folks to engage that anyone who hasn’t yet engaged should be considered unengaged – and pulled into that segment, as I’ll explain in more detail below. Our logic here has been borne out over many, many thousands of email campaigns: if someone is not engaging within the first few sends, there is a very small chance they become loyally engaged – or in fact engage at all – over their lifetime.

For emails both during and after the welcome series, we highly, highly recommend (because we can’t actually mandate it, or else we would) that you build automations to send more messages as users engage to harness their maximum potential by establishing a unique relationship with each subscriber.

Leveraging automated workflows to make sure you never miss a potential touchpoint with the consumer is central to our email practice at DMi. We design our always-on functionality to focus on consumer-centric timing and behaviors that will trigger an engagement. This means that as subscribers go through the customer lifecycle, you’re communicating at every phase of that lifecycle depending on where each individual subscriber is at.

Use this mentality to build content that will be of interest to these subscribers; examples include birthday greetings, content that incorporates site engagement (browse abandon, cart abandon) and viewed pages (if they viewed a page with a specific topic, send a follow-up about that specific topic), subscription anniversaries, reviews, etc.

How to craft content for each subscriber

Personalized content that increases engagement starts with smart segmentation and continues through progressive profiling.

The first segment we set up is users acquired organically vs. users acquired through paid campaigns. While organic subscribers might be more focused on brand recognition at the beginning of your relationship (which means you have more latitude to capture the full value of that customer before going promotional), newly acquired subscribers react far more strongly to promotions than to brand-building content.

If you don’t have the resources to support promotions for acquired users, it’s okay to send them the same content – but make sure you’re set up to stop sending to unengaged acquired subscribers faster than unengaged organic subscribers, since acquired subscribers are generally less brand-loyal.

If you’re looking to really lean into personalization, one powerful lever is progressive profiling, which you can use to develop more precise subscriber segments and auto-send relevant content based on their behavior and engagement with your campaigns.

Progressive profiling uses data including demographics, email engagement, and site engagement to determine content that will be of particular interest to your users. It’s become an increasingly important component of email campaigns as open rates have become less reliable (thanks, iOS 15!). Rather than reference shaky data, we recommend you lean into progressive profiling as a method of understanding which content to deploy for each individual user – or at least for highly specific user segments.

Basic (but absolutely critical) segments and how to use them

You don’t need to get into progressive profiling to develop user segments – in fact, the most important segmentation step is defining your loyally engaged, moderately engaged, and at-risk engaged users and preparing different communication cadences for each.

The big benefit: you’ll improve your chances of staying on the right side of spam thresholds.

So: first, define those segments within your CRM. Next, set up always-on rules to automatically move subscribers across segments based on their engagement bucket.

The most important function you’ll gain in doing this is quick identification (and subsequent removal) of unengaged subscribers – which is particularly important for acquisition campaigns that bring, on average, a less-loyal base of subscribers into your CRM.

Removing this bucket of users from your other segments allows you to do two things:

1. Communicate differently – e.g. sending rewarming messages and testing special offers to try to get those users to engage down the line.
2. Avoid paying for unengaged users. You do more than save costs here; you spare yourself some deliverability fallout that you would otherwise face from sending to subscribers who have never engaged.

So, to wrap up: before you spend a pile of money to bring new subscribers into your database, make sure you know your follow-up email strategy cold. Without part two in place, you risk low ROI, a wave of unsubscribes – and, even worse, landing yourself in spam purgatory that will make it tough to engage even your most loyal subscribers.