This post was originally posted on the DMA Email Marketing Blog.
Email subscribers are expecting more and more from the messages they receive in their inbox these days, making us, as marketers, work harder – and rightly so!
Email marketing is no longer about taking a single message and broadcasting it to your entire database. Irrelevancy is the new spam and anything your readers don’t find interesting or relevant, they will delete or mark as spam and complain to their ISP.
So, as users stop interacting with your emails, what can you do about it? How can you reach these subscribers and attract their attention?
Identify Inactive Subscribers
How you identify inactive subscribers will differ depending on your business.
For example, if you are emailing your subscribers more than once a month and they have not engaged with your mailings for between 3-6 months, they are turning inactive. Inactivity for longer than this and they are already inactive. For some businesses this will be shorter/longer and it really is a very personal decision based on your business rules and customer lifecycle but should always be looked at over a period of time rather than based on engagement with an individual campaign.
When you decide on the rules to use in your organisation, if you are able to, you can even go one step further and match email activity to activity with your brand or website (such as purchases or logging in) in order to create an even more comprehensive view of the subscribers activity and interest in your brand and inform your messaging.
However you decide to identify inactive subscribers, one thing is always true: If subscribers have not interacted with your mailings for a long period of time, they are showing that something is not hitting the mark with your messaging, frequency or other elements of your email programme.
Fix the problem
Once you have identified an inactive sub set of your subscribers, the first thing you should do is look to identify any problems or areas of discontent that are causing this inactivity and fix the problems to minimise this in future. This could include looking at all the elements of your email programme from the point of sign up to the unsubscribe process, and identifying particular areas or specific campaigns that could be contributing to the issues.
You can also implement a series of emails that aim to reactivate these subscribers; a re-engagement (reactivation) campaign.
Four ideas to considering when creating reactivation campaigns include:
- Remind the subscriber about the benefits of the website/email programme and talk them through key areas that they could be benefiting from.
- Give a special offer to encourage subscribers to make a purchase.
- Offer a survey to find out more about your subscribers and want they want to hear about from you.
- Prompt the subscriber to update their preferences to directly inform your segmentation strategy and allow you to provide relevant, targeted content in your mailings.
Removing subscribers
If a subscriber is not engaging with your content, product or service, it suggests a lack of interest, especially if they have not gone on to engage with your reactivation campaigns. By broadcasting your campaigns to subscribers that are not engaging with your emails you can encounter three main problems that can damage your sending reputation, leading to deliverability issues:
- Increased chance of hitting recycled spam traps.
- Deflated engagement rates.
- Increased complaint rates.
Removing subscribers from your database is a decision that should be made individually for each business, and if you decide not to remove these subscribers altogether, ensure that you separate them away from your main, important mailings using IP segmentation to ensure any negative ramifications caused by this data do not effect your key broadcasts.
However you decide to handle inactive subscribers in your database, the important thing is that you do something to either minimise disengagement from the start of the relationship by providing targeted, relevant content at the right time, or to reactivate or remove these users.
How do you handle inactive subscribers in your business? Leave us a comment below!
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