Sunset Flows for Coaches

Have you heard the term sunset flow before? If you have an email list running a sunset email flow every so often can help you increase engagement and keep the cost of your email marketing low.

What Is a Sunset Flow?

In email marketing, a sunset flow is designed to phase out inactive email subscribers. Most email marketing platforms charge based on the number of subscribers on your email list, so you want to remove email subscribers who don’t even open your emails. This means you’re only paying for email subscribers who want to receive emails from you.

A sunset email flow is an email automation where subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a set number of days (90 or 180 usually) are sent a last-ditch message to ask them if they want to keep receiving your emails. Email subscribers who unsubscribe of their own volition will obviously be removed from your email list. Email subscribers who don’t open the email within a certain period will also be unsubscribed from your email list.

What Is a Win-Back Campaign

Another term you may have heard if you’ve been researching email marketing and sunset flows is win-back campaign. A win-back campaign is an email (or an email sequence) you send before a sunset flow to try and win back stale email subscribers before you run the sunset flow. Win-back campaigns or win-back flows are high-value emails that are too good to miss. Your win-back emails could offer:

• A freebie
• Early access to one of your coaching programs
• Discounted access to one of your coaching programs or products
• An exclusive micro-offer
• An exclusive collaboration between you and a complimentary coach or service-provider
• High-value free content

The key here is to write a subject line that communicates the value inside the email without feeling like clickbait. You want your ideal coaching clients to open the email. You want to remind them why they signed up for your email list.

Can I Win-Back and Sunset Email Subscribers in One Email?

Yes, you absolutely can. Send an email with high-value free content that requires email subscribers to click a link. In the email body, you will tell the email subscribers that they have not opened your emails for a while and wanted to check if they still wanted to hear from you. Then offer them the following options:

• If they click the link to the high-value content, (don’t call it that in your email) they will remain on your email list unless they manually subscribe
• If they click a secondary link to stay subscribed, (even if the high-value content isn’t of interest) then they will remain on your email list
• If they click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, they will be unsubscribed
• If they do not click any of the links, then they will be unsubscribed within 7 days of receiving the email

Obviously, you should also set the sunset flow to unsubscribe them if they do not open the email, but you don’t need to write that in the email.

Why Should I Run a Sunset Flow

We’ve already talked a little bit about how inactive email subscribers can cost you money by bumping you into a higher package for your email marketing platform. Ideally, you only want to pay for email subscribers that are current, former, or ideal coaching clients because they’re the most likely to buy from you.

Having inactive email subscribers can also make email providers (like Gmail or Hotmail) that your emails are spam. Low engagement rates can bump your emails into less desirable inbox categories or even the spam folder of your email subscribers. You want to keep your open rates and engagement rates as high as possible.

Open rates are the percentage of email subscribers that opened an email. The average email open rate is around 20%.

Engagement rates are the percentage of email subscribers who click a link in your email (not the unsubscribe link). The percentage will be equal to or lower than your open rate because it counts all email subscribers, not just the ones who open your emails. The average email engagement rate is around 5%. Engagement rates are also called click rates or clickthrough rates.

How Often Should I Run a Sunset Flow?

That’s the great thing about using an email marketing platform. You can set it up to run automatically.

Use your email marketing platform’s campaign creator to create a sunset flow that will trigger when a subscriber is inactive for a certain period. The length of inactivity that triggers the sunset campaign should fit your email frequency. If you email your subscribers once a fortnight or once a month, then 180-days or more would be a good period because they’ve missed 6+ emails from you. If you email weekly or multiple times per week, then a shorter period may be more suitable. 60-90 days is the recommended minimum trigger for a sunset flow. Less than 2 months of inactivity could be due to a busy period or a holiday.

Set your sunset flow up to trigger automatically when your email subscribers reach a certain period of inactivity, and it will run constantly in the background to keep your email list fresh.

Sunset Email Subject Line Ideas

The subject lines of your sunset flow are important to make sure that interested email subscribers have a chance to stay on your list. You want to capture their attention with the subject line, so they click the email to see what it’s about. Here are some sunset flow subject line ideas for coaches:

• Is this goodbye, NAME?
• Hey, NAME, where’d you go?
• Come back!
• We miss you, NAME!
• I’m not too proud to beg
• Breakups hurt
• Can we tempt you back to the dark side?
• Look at what you’re missing
• What can I do to convince you to stay?
• Is this the end, NAME?
• Can we still be friends, NAME?
• NAME, are you still there?

Most sunset email subject lines tend to riff on the break-up theme. Try and make the subject line for your sunset email a little cryptic and intriguing so people click the email to find out. Using the email subscriber’s name in the email subject line will also help your email to stand out in their inbox.

If you have questions about sunset email flows for coaches, get in touch and we’ll give you a hand. We are happy to answer quick questions, or you can hire us to write a sunset email flow for you.