How to Revive Tired Email Subscribers

We’ve written before about how you can combat list fatigue to keep your email list engaged, but often, despite your best efforts, there are subscribers who become inactive, or "emotionally unsubscribed" without actually unsubscribing themselves from your list.. These are the subscribers that receive your emails but don’t open your messages, don’t click-though and essentially don’t interact with your emails in anyway, but—they haven’t unsubscribed. This type of inactive subscriber is a re-engagement opportunity waiting to happen for marketers and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Having a large number of inactive subscribers  is completely normal for most companies' email lists.  Your subscribers are busy people who receive hundreds of emails a day and it isn't unlikely that some of them have just let their interest in your messages slide.  According to a recent study from Merkle Interactive Services, even permission based emails are deleted 55% of the time by recipients without ever having been opened.

Why should you care about inactive subscribers?

1. They make it harder to track your email marketing performance. If your email list is riddled with inactive subscribers it makes it very difficult for you to get a good idea of how successful your campaigns actually are. Metrics like click-through and open rate will be skewed by the users who are inactive (who were never going to open your emails anyways).
2. It costs you money to send unwanted emails. Depending on your email service provider, you may be paying on a per email basis. If that's the case, then you are spending money to send emails to people who are unengaged with your communications and you are wasting money which could be spent on recipients who are interested in receiving your messages.
3. They are an opportunity. If you're using opt-in email tactics (which we highly recommend) then the recipients you have who are inactive would have been engaged enough at some point to give you their contact information. In that case, inactive subscribers are actually an opportunity to re-engage jaded subscribers and potentially renew business relationships. 
   
4. Inactive subscribers can harm overall deliverability. ISPs are beginning to take into consideration whether people are sending emails to recipients who never respond. Inactive email address become associated with dormant accounts and often fall into spam traps. When you then continue to send messages to these accounts you risk getting blocked or labeled as spam.

1. Analyze the situation. The first step in addressing your inactive subscribers is to establish who the inactive subscribers actually are.  You can do this by analyzing their subscriber history or profile for certain characteristics like: email activity,  engagement and interaction levels with online content and purchase history.
2. Segment inactive subscribers to adjust campaigns accordingly. Once you've determined who your inactive subscribers are, it should be a simple matter to segment them into separate groups so you can send them specifically targeted re-engagement campaigns (we'll go into more detail about this below). Segmenting these subscribers into separate groups allows you to regulate the frequency of their emails, send them specific campaigns and to monitor and analyze the results of your re-engagement strategies. 
3. Send re-engagement-specific emails. Sending email campaigns specifically targeted to re-engaging inactive subscribers can be an effective way to grab their attention. Email campaigns which features things like surveys requesting feedback and content suggestions, offers for free whitepapers and other collateral and rewards or discounts for re-engaging can be easy to implement with relatively quick results. 
4. Measure these campaigns to determine what works and what doesn’t. Since your segmenting your email list and sending out campaigns targeted towards inactive subscribers, it's essential that you take your campaigns to the next step by measuring them and optimizing them so you can re-engage the most subscribers possible.
5. Monitor inactives so you can catch them early. By regularly monitoring your email list and subscribers over time you will hopefully be able to begin to spot subscribers that are becoming less engaged before they actually become inactive. If you can achieve this, then half of your battle is already won!

Posted by Amberlie Denny at October 13, 2010 8:15 AM

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