Run a re-engagement campaign in HubSpot

Securing verified consent is a fundamental element of inbound email marketing. A re-engagement campaign is an effective way to confirm the opt-in status of contacts who previously provided your brand with verifiable consent to be sent marketing emails.

Please note: you should only use a permission pass campaign to reconfirm opt-in status for your contacts. You should not use a permission pass campaign to gain opt-in for a contact who hasn't yet provided it directly to your brand. HubSpot requires a verifiable opt-in record for any contact included in a marketing email send.

How a re-engagement campaign works

A re-engagement campaign is a one-time email campaign that requests any contacts who haven’t already used some form of double opt-in to confirm that they would still like to receive emails from you. Only the contacts who confirm their subscription status are then kept on your segment. Those who don’t confirm will then be opted out of your marketing emails in HubSpot. The result is a highly engaged segment of contacts who have proven that they want to continue receiving marketing emails from your company. You can see some examples of permission pass campaigns on the Community.

This article walks through the steps to implement a re-engagement campaign. The steps below are meant to be followed in order, but you can click a particular step to jump straight to it if needed.

1. Enable resubscription emails for forms and review forms consent information and email subscription types
2. Create a segment of contacts who have not interacted with your emails recently
3. Create a new permission pass email to send to your segment of contacts
4. Review your email's post-send metrics
5. Determine which contacts to opt out of your emails
6. Opt out your unconfirmed contacts
7. Repeat (optional)

1. Review subscription settings and confirm notification and consent information

Enable resubscription emails for forms

Before you start your re-engagement campaign, enable the resubscription emails for forms feature in HubSpot. Enabling this feature will allow contacts who opted out of your emails to resubscribe if they fill out a HubSpot form.

Add notification and consent information to your forms

Make sure your forms have notification and consent information added to them so contacts know what they're opting in to when submitting a form. 

Review your subscription settings

Before getting started with the next steps, ensure that you've set up email subscription types as well. If the contacts that you're emailing are subscribers to several different subscription types, you may want to use the default Marketing Information subscription type, but your legal team is the best resource to give you compliance information for your specific situation.

2. Create a segment of contacts who have not interacted with your emails recently

Create an active segment of contacts who have not engaged with your emails recently.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to CRM > Segments.
2. In the upper right, click Create segment.
3. Name your segment and make it an active segment.
4. Add your segment criteria:
   • If you want to run a re-engagement campaign for all your unengaged contacts, follow these instructions to create your segment.
   • If you are running a re-engagement campaign based on the result of a specific email campaign, add the following criteria: Marketing email activity | Contact received email but did not open it | [Select the campaign to be focused on] AND Contact Property | Last marketing email open date | is more than 52 weeks ago
     OR Marketing email activity | Contact received email but did not open it | [Select the campaign to be focused on] AND Contact property | Last marketing email open date | is unknown
5. Click Save.

3. Create a new email to send to your segment of contacts

Create a new email to send to your segment. This email will include a CTA to encourage your recipients to confirm their subscription.

1. In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing > Email.
2. In the upper right, click Create email.
3. In the dialog box, select Regular.
4. Select a template, name your email, then click Create email.
5. When editing your email content, include a CTA that users can click to stay opted in. You can link your CTA to a simple thank you page, where you can confirm a user's opt-in status or even present them with a new offer.
6. When selecting your recipients, include the segment that you created in step 2.
7. Select a subscription type:
   • The subscription type should correspond to the subscribers in the segment you created in step 2. For example, if the users in your segment originally subscribed to the Marketing Newsletter subscription type, you should select the same subscription type for your re-engagement email.
   • If the recipients in the segment you created in step 2 are subscribed to several different subscription types, you may want to use the default Marketing Information subscription type, but your legal team is the best resource to give you compliance information for your specific situation.
8. Use the Send or schedule tab to send your permission pass email.

Please note: if your CTA links to a subscription preferences page, HubSpot will not be able to track the associated clicks to the page. Linking to a thank you page is the best option to accurately track the engagement of your re-engagement campaign.

4. Review your email's post-send metrics

In the post-send metrics on the Recipients tab, you can see which contacts took action on the email. Contacts who confirmed by clicking on your CTA should continue to receive additional email campaigns from you. Those who didn’t should be opted out of all future email.

5. Determine which contacts to opt out of your emails

To figure out which contacts should be opted out, create two active segments using the below criteria:

• Segment 1 - Marketing email activity | Contact clicked a link in [Permission pass email]
• Segment 2 - Marketing email activity | Contact was sent [Permission pass email] AND Segment membership | Contact is not member of [Segment 1]

6. Opt out your unconfirmed contacts

Use the second segment to opt out contacts who did not engage with your re-engagement email. It's recommended that you wait a week before continuing to give your recipients time to interact with your permission pass email.

1. Export Segment 2 as a CSV.
2. Re-import that same CSV file as an opt-out list.
3. Going forward, these contacts will be ineligible for email sends unless they resubscribe.

You can also opt to use a workflow with the Manage Subscription Status action to manage their subscription status.

7. Repeat the process (optional)

While traditional re-engagement campaigns send just one email, you can choose to send two or three emails. Use segment criteria and select your previous permission pass emails to create segments for each subsequent re-engagement email.

For more details about re-engagement campaigns, refer to Spamhaus. As a best practice, it is recommended to enable double opt-in for your forms and conduct re-engagement campaigns on a quarterly basis.