Quick tip - how to re-engage inactive subscribers
November 26th, 2007 by Megan OuelletList maintenance and hygiene are key factors that directly affect your deliverability and reputation. It isn’t enough to rely on the unsubscribe button and the removal of hard bounces to maintain your list. You must review the activity of your subscribers periodically to determine which subscribers are actively reading and responding to your messages and which ones are simply deleting the messages without reading them. Continuing to email to these inactive subscribers can do more harm than good over time as many of them use the Report Spam button to complain about your emails even though they have opted-in to your list. So it is important to know how to re-engage these subscribers before it gets to that point, and it is also important to know when to remove them from your list altogether.
The first step is to analyze your list and calculate list fatigue, or the percentage of inactive subscribers. List fatigue is caused by subscribers that haven’t opened or clicked on one of your messages over a number of email sends, and it is a telltale sign that your emails are no longer relevant to those subscribers. Each company should set its own threshold, but many companies begin re-engagement campaigns after ten consecutive messages are disregarded, overlooked, or ignored.
However, your needs may differ so it is important for you to know what is causing your subscribers to become disinterested in your emails. For example, some of your subscribers might have opted-in to your list using an email address that they rarely access, which means they weren’t that interested to begin with. Or you could discover that your emails are being sent to bulk or junk mail folders instead of the subscribers’ inboxes, so they aren’t receiving the messages after all. Closely monitoring your inactive subscribers will help you recognize deliverability issues that you might not find otherwise, and it will help you determine which subscribers should be targeted for re-engagement campaigns.
There are a number of re-engagement tactics you can use to try to recapture the attention of your audience. These include:
- Testing different times you send your messages to see if a new time generates additional interest
- Adding the recipients’ names to the subject line
- Adjusting the number of monthly emails you send to those subscribers
- Offering a special discount to give them an even greater incentive to click on your message
- Using a scarcity clause stating that they will be removed from the list unless they select to opt-in to your list again
- Sending a survey
- Profiling and segmenting your list
- Using dynamic content to send specific content targeted to subscribers’ exact needs
- Testing different email formats, graphics, etc.
Chances are, many of your inactive subscribers will respond to one of these re-engagement campaigns and you will win business that might have slipped through the cracks. And even if some subscribers remain inactive, you will be able to remove them from your list before they complain about your messages so you will be saving your reputation and helping your deliverability in the long run.