Step-by-Step: Find and Re-Engage Inactive WordPress Users

Never say goodbye to your followers and friends! Re-engage your inactive WordPress users with automated email notifications from Uncanny Automator.

We don’t have to tell you: at the center of every WordPress website is a vibrant and active community. Every now and then, however, a user or two seems to fall through the digital cracks and into the vastness of cyberspace. That’s probably what brought you here.

You might have noticed a drop in your overall user engagement. Or, perhaps, you haven’t heard from a specific user in a long time. Or, maybe, you have no idea who has been logging in and who hasn’t and you’d like to figure out who your most engaged users are.

Regardless, you’ve come to the right place. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to find and re-engage with your inactive WordPress users with automated email notifications from Uncanny Automator.

By the end of this quick tutorial, you’ll be able to:

• define how long a user must be dormant before they are considered inactive,
• automatically identify and target inactive WordPress users,
• integrate with your CRM and launch re-engagement campaigns,
• and much more!

Without further ado, let’s go get those inactive users back from cyberspace!

Find Inactive WordPress Users with Uncanny Automator

Finding inactive WordPress users is the first step in setting up your re-engagement campaign.

Now, you could go through your list of users from your WordPress Admin Dashboard, clicking on every user’s profile and checking their last login date. But that would be tedious and by the time you finished, you’d probably want to be inactive yourself. Thankfully, you can off-load that task to Uncanny Automator.

Automator is the #1 automation and integration plugin for WordPress websites. But, once we show you how to use some of its more advanced features (such as the ability to create and manipulate user meta data), it can be so much more.

Using combinations of triggers and actions, you can automate workflows across your favorite apps and plugins. Additionally, Automator gives you the power to edit and manage your WordPress users in bulk. This means that you can use Automator as a marketing automation tool to run your entire re-engagement campaign. Or integrate it with your CRM—it’s entirely up to you!

The FREE forever version of Automator doesn’t have the ability to manage user meta data. As such, throughout this article, we’ll be relying on Automator Pro features as well as some Automator Business and Agency features.

Thankfully, Automator offers a 14-day money back guarantee so you can explore cyberspace in search of your inactive WordPress users totally risk-free.

Get your Automator Pro license so you can follow along.>>>

Send Email Notifications to Inactive WordPress Users

In this section, we’re going to show you how to set up automated email notifications for WordPress users who don’t log in after 30 days.

Recreating the Automator recipe pictured above only takes six steps. Here’s how we did it.

Step 1: Create and Name a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

You’ll want to give your recipe a name that makes it easy to recognize at a glance. For example, we’ve named this recipe Re-Engage Inactive Users.

Step 2: Configure Your Trigger(s)

In the Triggers panel, from the menu of available integrations, click on WordPress.

From the drop-down list that appears, select A user logs in to the site.

Your completed trigger should look like this:

Step 3: Configure Your First Action

In the Actions panel, click on Add action. From the menu of available integrations, click on WordPress. From the drop-down list that appears, select Set user meta.

This is where you can create unique user meta data to track your users’ activity with key/value pairs.

In the Key field, enter “last_login”. We’re going to use a token (i.e., dynamic data pulled from your WordPress website) for the value.

To select a token, click on the Asterisk in the Value field and select Date and time > Current Unix timestamp.

Once you’re finished, click Save.

With this action, every time a user logs in to the site, their last_login meta data will update to the current date and time, represented in a Unix timestamp. (If you’re unfamiliar with Unix time, you can read our brief and informative guide here.)

Step 4: Configure Your Second Action

In the Actions panel, click on Add action. From the menu of available integrations, click on Emails.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Send an email.

Automator will present you with an editor where you can draft the email message that you would like to send to your inactive WordPress users. We’re going to use tokens (i.e., dynamic data pulled from your WordPress website and within recipes) to fill in the fields.

In the To field, click on the Asterisk and select the User email token.

Fill in the Subject and Body fields with compelling copy to re-engage your inactive users. Don’t forget to use tokens to personalize the message.

Once you’ve drafted your re-engagement email, click Save. When you’re finished, your Actions panel should look like this:

Step 5: Configure Your Filter + Delay

To get Automator to send your re-engagement email to only the users who haven’t logged in for 30 days or more, we need to add a filter and a delay. Setting up both is easy.

First, hover over the Send an email action and click Filter.

In Automator, conditions define filters. In this case, the condition we want to configure is a user’s last_login meta value exceeding 30 days.

To do so, in the Condition window that appears, select A token meets a condition.

The token that we’re going to define here is the difference between the current date and the date that a user last logged in.

In the Token field, click on the Asterisk and select Modifiers > Calculation from the drop-down list.

A Calculation window will appear. Click on the Asterisk to select the Current Unix timestamp token, then type the minus symbol, “-”, into the field.

To select the user’s last_login meta, click on the Asterisk once again, select Advanced > User meta from the drop-down list and enter “last_login” into the User meta key field.

Once you’re finished, click Add token.

Once you’ve returned to the Configure the rule window, fill out the Criteria and Value fields as follows:

(Note: 2,592,000 represents 30 days in Unix time. If you want to specify a different period of dormancy, you can calculate that period in Unix time as follows: number of days * 24 * 60 * 60 where “24” represents the number of hours in a day, “60” represents the number of minutes in an hour and the final “60″ represents the number of seconds in a minute.)

Once you’re finished, click Save.

Next, we’re going to set the delay so that Automator will only calculate the difference between the current date and the user’s last_login after 30 days.

Once again, hover over the Send an email action and click Delay. In the pop-up window that appears, configure the delay as follows:

Once you’re finished, click Set delay. With both the filter and the delay, your Send an email action should look something like this:

Step 6: Re-Engage Inactive WordPress Users!

You’re just about ready to launch into the void of cyberspace to get your WordPress users back! All that’s left for you to do is to toggle your recipe from Draft to Live.

With this recipe, you have an automated re-engagement campaign that you can customize any which way you’d like.

Better yet, Automator integrates seamlessly with the top CRM apps and plugins. Seeing as though CRMs only monitor your contacts’ email activity, not their web activity, integrating with Automator can elevate your marketing automation.

Integrate seamlessly with CRMs such as HubSpot, Groundhogg, Drip, ActiveCampaign and many others.

Launch Re-Engagement Campaigns with Automator

The recipe that we’ve just created will ensure that your WordPress users don’t slip through your digital fingertips going forward. But what about the users who are already circling that distant digital black hole? Don’t worry, they’re not beyond your reach just yet.

With the recipe pictured above, we’re able to immediately launch a FluentCRM re-engagement campaign for any of our users who haven’t completed an introductory course associated with one of our LearnDash groups.

Step 1: Create and Name a New Recipe

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Everyone.

We’ve named this recipe Launch Re-Engagement Campaign.

Step 2: Configure Your Trigger(s)

Unlike with other automations, we want this recipe to run immediately. From the menu of available integrations, select Run now and Trigger recipe manually.

Step 3: Configure Your User Loop

In the Actions panel, click Add and select User loop. Within the loop, click Add action.

From the menu of available integrations, select your preferred CRM. Depending on the CRM integration you’ve selected and how you choose to segment your contacts, you can tag the user or add them to a list.

Regardless, fill in the Email field using the User email token.

Once you’re finished, click Save. Your Loop panel should look something like this:

Step 4: Add Filter(s)

We only want to launch our re-engagement campaign for our inactive WordPress users. But, without a last login date, we’ll have to come up with another way to define inactivity.

For this example, we’re defining inactive users as those who haven’t completed the introductory course associated with one of our LearnDash groups.

To add this filter, hover over the CRM action and click Filter. In the Condition window that appears, select LearnDash > The user has not completed a course and select the course associated with the LearnDash group.

When you’re finished, click Save filter. Repeat the same step to add any additional filters that suit your re-engagement campaign.

Lastly, click Any and select All from the drop-down list.

Step 5: Get Your Inactive WordPress Users Back!

All that’s left for you to do is click Run now and watch as Automator pulls your inactive WordPress users back from the event horizon of that black hole!

Stay Active, Keep Automating

With powerful marketing automations like these, you’ll never have to say goodbye to your WordPress users again. And, with 150 integrations and many more on the way, you can keep in touch with your users however you choose.

Want to know more about marketing automation and re-engaging with your inactive WordPress users? Drop us a line in the comments section below and we’ll get right back to you—we’re very active automators!