By targeting unengaged subscribers, your brand has an opportunity to understand what kind of messages and at what cadence these subscribers prefer to receive messages in order to improve subscriber retention of your overall SMS program.
Benefits of Targeting Unengaged Subscribers
- It's an opportunity to re-engage and set expectations. Use this segment to re-engage subscribers by asking them what kind of messages they'd like to receive and at what cadence so you can retain more subscribers while delivering timely and relevant content.
- It's cost-effective. Targeting the unengaged pocket of your subscriber base at a lower frequency with more thoughtful messages is more economical for your brand.
- Preserve your brand reputation. Subscribers may become less engaged over time. If you continue to text them too frequently, it can leave a bad impression. Give your subscribers the option to opt out of your SMS program in order to preserve your brand reputation.
Creating Segments
Before we dive in, let's quickly discuss how to create a segment and take a look at the segment creation page. To begin creating your segment, select Messaging in the side menu of your Postscript dashboard, then select Segments. From there, select Create Segment in the top-right corner of the page.
- Name your segment. Choose a name that tells you who the segment targets and is easily identifiable when adding this segment to your campaign.
- Review segment size. As you apply criteria, the number of members in your segment size will adjust. If the number doesn't look correct, double-check your criteria.
- Include all phone-only subscribers means you'd like to include all phone numbers that do not have customer data associated with them. These profiles consist of phone numbers only.
- Define your criteria. Choose your criteria and a corresponding parameter (e.g. greater than, includes, etc.). Enter your value in the empty field.
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Add additional criteria. You can include one or more criteria in a segment. Additional criteria help you further narrow your intended subset of customers. You can add additional criteria using AND or OR statements.
- AND Example: Customers who have spent over $50.00 AND have never received a text from our store.
- OR Example: Customers who have purchased our coral water bottle OR customers who have purchased our lime green water bottle.
- Select Save Segment to save your new segment.
Additional Criteria
The following section is to highlight criteria your brand can leverage when crafting an unengaged subscriber segment. Tip: Combine several criteria by using AND and OR connectors to get more granular with your targeting.
Number of Orders equals 0 OR Last Order Date before last 365 days
- What does it mean? This will add subscribers to this segment who have either never ordered or haven't ordered within the last year.
- Why include it in this segment? We'll use this criterion to target subscribers who have never ordered or have not ordered recently from your brand.
Subscriber Has Clicked not equal to TRUE
- What does it mean? This will also include subscribers who have never clicked on any link in your messages.
- Why include it in this segment? With upwards of a 98% open rate for SMS, it's important to consider who is actually interacting with your messages or clicking the links included.
Subscriber Created Date before last 180 days
- What does it mean? This will add also subscribers who opted into your SMS program longer than 6 months ago.
- Why include it in this segment? If a subscriber is relatively new to your SMS program, we want to give them time to begin engaging with your brand.
Additional Resources
- Target Engaged Subscribers. Now that you've learned how to target unengaged subscribers, learn how to target engaged subscribers so you can convert more subscribers into customers with relevant messages.
- How to Create a Holiday Gift Guide. Send your unengaged segment a holiday gift guide campaign to better gauge where their interests lie, collect zero-party data, and send them more targeted campaigns throughout the holiday season.
- Guide to SMS Contact List Hygiene covers how to build a win-back campaign that asks subscribers about their expectations of your SMS program (i.e. asks them what the subscribers want to see and how frequently).
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