How to reduce dormant subscribers

Category: Email Marketing

If there is anything worse than a subscriber who signs out from our newsletter or mark us as spam, it is a subscriber who does nothing.

Getting a “healthy” contact list – free of unsubscribes, bounces and spam reports- should be our top priority if we are to succeed in our email marketing campaigns. However, our efforts will be in vain if we have a high number of inactive subscribers.

What is an inactive subscriber?

Inactive subscribers are those contacts that do not interact in any way with our sendings: they do not open our emails and they do not perform any action on the content sent either.

Most inactive subscribers are secondary email accounts that are only checked sporadically or abandoned accounts that are not accessed for months, but fully active personal or professional accounts should not be ruled out.

How do inactive subscribers affect me?

Obviously the initial impact of an inactive subscriber on our business is: 0 conversions, but we must not forget that a large number of inactive contacts also affects our deliverability.

The anti-spam filters are increasingly sophisticated and take into account a greater number of variables to decide whether an email should end or not in the spam folder, and the way how users interact with the mail received is one of things that are increasingly considered.

How do I fix the problem of inactive subscribers?

The best way to know which inactive subscribers should be removed from our lists and which not, is to launch a reactivation campaign.

After analysing the data of 33 brands who used reactivation campaigns, a study of Martech established the following facts:

• the open rates were around 12%,
• 45% of the users who received the campaign opened other emails sent a posteriori,
• 75% of the reactivated subscribers continued opening emails after 89 days and 25% up to 300 days later.

Reactivation campaigns can focus in various ways, but the most common one is to offer some sort of advantage or significant discount on our products or services.

Although this strategy usually gets good results, it is important to use reactivation campaigns in moderation, it should not be your usual way of getting customers, otherwise your margins will be reduced considerably. Furthermore, the studies also point out that users that are reactivated at low prices tend to be "less loyal" to the brands.

What shall I do with those contacts who still keep inactive?

Returning to the study of Marketing Land quoted above, about 24% of users who did not open the revival campaign itself opened subsequent campaigns. There is no assurance that the reactivation campaign was the one who caused interactions in subsequent sendings, so our advice is, do not rush, let time and study thoroughly the results of your campaigns before deleting a contact.

 

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