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Setting up a sunset strategy for an ecommerce brand, that is heavily influenced by seasonality. Meaning that the biggest portion of customers are usually most interested at the start of the season (spring in this case) and might update their equipment then. People might also skip a couple of years and not buy anything but around every 5 years they ought to have returned (if not, they have quit the hobby). We need to be with them at the moment they do decide to make another purchase.

We send out weekly newsletters currently with promotions. If I’d go by the usual 60/90 days to suppress profiles, we’d be missing out on them next season. 

Hence, I’m trying to come up with ways to counter this.

Thinking about something along the lines of:

First part of the strategy

  • 60d no engagement: change frequency from weekly to monthly
    • trigger based: open/click newsletter? change back to weekly
  • 60-180d no engagement: no more newsletters (but don’t suppress)
  • Trigger based: viewed website? Change back to monthly  and restart the 180d period
    • Opened/Click? Change back to weekly and restart the 60 day period

Second part of the strategy what if we keep them on monthly for all time (no sunset), but limit the negative impact they have on each send by spreading them out over the weekly newsletters. Creating 4 (week 1,2,3,4 of the year) segments. This would cut down these unengaged profiles by ¾ every weekly newsletter. Could even spread out further and go quarterly sends.

 

Thoughts? 

Other ways you have come about doing this?

Hey @Stijn Meyvaert 

Sorry for the delay in response! 

I think your strategy makes sense! You want to keep them engaged with your brand, without hurting your deliverability! Another thought would to add a question to your signup form on how frequently they would like to receive marketing or the type of updates they would like to receive and then use those profile properties to create segments to send to. This way you are only sending on the frequency and updates they want. This may also help reduce a drop in your metrics.

 

Hi @Stijn Meyvaert, 

Thanks for your question and please forgive the delayed response. As @stephen.trumble said, your overall strategy makes sense to balance engagement with deliverability during a 1-3 year re-purchase cycle. 

To build upon the idea that @stephen.trumble offered, I think the key in this situation is the CONTENT that you provide to your customers during this long repurchase cycle. As you outline in your strategy, your goal is engagement from your customers between orders….not necessarily more frequent purchases. Therefore, I would prioritize collecting first-party data during the pre- and post-purchase stage so you can develop valuable content that resonates with your customer audience. If the content is engaging, then your customers should engage with the emails. 

Some other ideas for engagement between purchases: 

  • offer your customers a referral incentive 
  • create a community and send emails about that
  • feature your customers in your content 

 

I hope that helps! Please let us know how it turns out for you.

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