Based on our in-house calculations an average- sized email list, with less than 5,000 recipients may contain as many as 27 to 36 percent of inactive subscribers. Furthermore, an older email list will typically have more unengaged or inactive list members. AND that number will be larger with bigger member lists, reaching in some cases as much as 40% inactive list members.
In this context, we identify inactive subscribers as those who reportedly have not clicked or opened a single email in a certain time frame over the number of emails received.
Excluding bounces, what would cause a list member subscriber to become an inactive subscriber?
How do you figure out who really is an inactive subscriber?
As with most digital marketing stats, there are no real rules when it comes to list members. Therefore, here are some of our rules to determine inactivity
Select a time period that is long enough to gather information to work with. For example, use a baseline of a minimum of 10 sent messages over 6 months.
Run your most active report for the period you selected, in this case, the past 6 months starting with the most recent mailing. Download this information to a spreadsheet such as Excel. Sort your list by the number of messages sent to each recipient.
Delete recipients who received fewer than 10 messages (or the number of messages sent you want to use)
Sort your list in descending order by unique opens and clickthrough’s
Remove every recipient that has opened an email and clicked on a link.
You now have your list of inactive subscribers. With that information create an “inactive” field in your demographic table. Upload your list. You now have the ability to segment your campaigns with specific messages and frequency to these particular list members
With this list you can re-engage your inactive subscribers, using:
- Special Offers
- Interest Surveys
- Incentives to update their profile page
And if you do not get the response you hope for:
Review demographics, to send relevant, personalized messages- Try sending different days and times
- Modify the frequency of your mailings
- Create different content
- Experiment with a different format – send text email instead of HTML
- Test different Subject Lines
- Send a physical postcard with an incentive to remain a subscriber
Also review:
The 10 top reasons why your list subscribers are inactive
Email and Engagement is your email engaged
Hitting the Email Industry Benchmark
Today’s digital email marketer has great tools to create a win-back email marketing campaign. The key to making this work, identify those inactive subscribers before they leave altogether and become a churn statistic. If you have a list of inactive members before you hit that delete button, learn how to do a re-engagement campaign, give us a call (734-529-5331) and we’ll show you how!
