It’s a new year, but that doesn’t mean you should leave your old subscribers in the dust. Email marketing is a great personalized medium for reaching out to inactive subscribers. An inactive subscriber means someone who hasn’t opened, responded or clicked your emails within a certain amount of time. This could be anywhere between a month to a year, depending on what kind of email campaign you’re talking about. A daily deal site might define an inactive subscriber as someone who hasn’t engaged with their emails in 3 months, whereas a monthly newsletter may consider a subscriber inactive if they haven’t engaged in 6 months. With the use of email marketing, you can find out why they stopped buying or using your services, and offer them an incentive to awaken their interest.

Here’s a list of some reasons why people may have become inactive:

  • Your emails aren’t important to them
  • Your emails are going into their junk/spam folders
  • You email them too much and they only skim over your emails now
  • You don’t email enough and they’ve forgotten who you are
  • They only subscribed for that one-time deal

There are many other reasons why a subscriber might have become inactive, but many of these can be remedied! What if your inactive subscribers are still interested in your company, but just need to be reminded? Even if some subscribers do not end up coming back, the re-engagement email campaign process will help you clean-up your own email lists and help you achieve better email deliverability in the future.

According to Silverpop, inactive customers account for about 60% of a business’ total subscriber base. Inactivity happens. As time passes, interests start to wane, especially if your readers have already gotten what they want. Even though email opens decrease and clicks fade over time, many of these subscribers can be won back.

How do we wake up inactive subscribers? Re-engagement email campaigns, of course! It’s the beginning of the year and what better time to win back your old subscribers? There are 2 main steps for re-engagement email campaigns:

  • Identifying who to re-engage
  • Sending re-engagement email campaigns

First things first, you should analyze your inactive subscribers’ history. Use old data to determine the amount of time between when those subscribers last interacted with your emails and when they stopped engaging. You should try sending your re-engagement email campaigns before a subscriber has reached inactivity because you have a better chance of bringing them back before they’re too far gone.

Once you have decided what you consider an inactive timeframe, use it to send out re-engagement emails that start before that timeframe. For example, if you have decided 6 months is inactive, send out your re-engagement email campaign at the subscriber’s 4th month of inactivity.

Your re-engagement email campaigns should include a personalized message about how you haven’t seen them in a while, and maybe even a promotion to tempt them to return. An email subject line that says “We Miss You!” will get the subscriber’s attention. You could highlight things that have changed since the last time they have visited your website in the email. Once you have tracked down who has not opened or clicked your re-engagement email, you can label them clearly as inactive and take them off your list for future emails.

You can also send an email that asks inactive subscribers if they would like to continue receiving emails from you as part of your re-engagement email campaign. You can let them know that if they do not respond or engage with the re-engagement email you’ve just sent, you will remove them from your list. Deadlines are a good strategy for re-engagement email campaigns. These are best reserved as a last resort. A deadline graciously asks recipients to opt-in again by a certain date or they will be removed.

(Source: Roxy)

Email marketing is a great way to bring back customers. People just need to be reminded sometimes. Take this opportunity to drop your inactive subscribers a line and remind them how much you appreciate their business. While not all of your subscribers will re-engage with you, regaining a few is better than none! Start looking through your list today to find out which of your subscribers have not opened your emails.