Glossary
What is re-engagement?
Re-engagement is a campaign strategy aimed at bringing back existing users who have become inactive, prompting them to return and use the product again.
Why it is attractive
Lapsed users are the cheapest population to reach that a business has. They already know the product, they already installed it, and reaching them costs a fraction of acquiring someone new.
The reported returns are correspondingly excellent, which is exactly why the discipline requires more scepticism than any other channel.
The channels
- [Push notifications](/resources/glossary/push-notification), where permission survives — free to send and easy to overuse.
- Email, which is durable and reaches users who removed the app entirely.
- Paid re-engagement, targeting known lapsed users through advertising platforms.
- Deep links, which land the user at the thing being offered rather than at a home screen.
Why performance over-claims
Re-engagement targets people defined by prior engagement, and a meaningful share of them were going to return anyway on their own cycle. Any campaign served in the meantime collects the credit.
This is the same structural bias as retargeting, concentrated further. Attributed re-engagement performance is therefore reliably better than causal lift, and the gap is often large.
The check is a holdout against a matched lapsed segment — see incrementality. Teams running it for the first time routinely revise their re-engagement budgets downward, and reallocate toward the activation problems that created the lapsed population.
Doing it well
Segment by why they lapsed rather than by how long ago. A user who never activated needs a different intervention from one who used the product for a year and drifted — and the first group is usually not recoverable by messaging at all.
And set reattribution windows honestly. A short inactivity period with a long reattribution window will report spectacular results and mean nothing.
Common questions
How long should someone be inactive before re-engagement?
Longer than a normal usage gap for your product. Messaging someone who is simply between sessions is annoying and inflates measured performance with returns that were happening anyway.
Is push or paid re-engagement better?
Push is free and only reaches users who kept permission. Paid reaches those who did not, at a cost. Most programmes use push first and paid for the segment it cannot reach.
More in growth and engagement
Acquiring users, and the behaviour that says whether they stayed.