It’s frustrating when you have inactive subscribers playing hard to get. The subscribers have not expressed outright disinterest by unsubscribing, but they’re just not opening your emails. The good news is that you have not lost them forever, and you have a chance to win them back!
How can I show email love to inactive subscribers and avoid a permanent breakup?
If you have not already, create an email re-engagement campaign that’s specifically designed to engage with your inactive email subscribers. To do so, create an email to draw these subscribers back in. There are 2 approaches that are most widely used:
- The “We miss you” approach. These emails generally say something like, “We haven’t seen you in a while,” or “We’ve missed you,” or “We’d like you to take another look, and here’s why.” Often, these types of emails are accompanied with a coupon, a special offer, or opportunity to update subscriber preferences.
And…
- The “We’ll give you some space” approach. In this model you simply send less email to your unengaged audience. For example, you can send a weekly newsletter to your unengaged subscribers as opposed to a daily newsletter.
Ideally, email re-engagement programs should be an automated program and require a low level of ongoing effort and maintenance.
Are there any risks in reaching out to my lost email loves?
Each ISP uses different filtering technology to determine a message’s inbox eligibility. While they do not provide specific details about their technology, we do know that ISPs monitor how often their users are engaging with your brand’s emails. When a subscriber has not opened or clicked your brand’s emails for an extended period of time, you run the risk of your emails being directed to bulk folders or marked as spam.
To safely reach out to your unengaged subscribers, create a plan with your PostUp delivery consultant who can help you avoid mistakes that commonly derail email re-engagement campaigns. Your delivery consultant can help you create a plan, test that plan and then guide you to create your re-engagement program leveraging PostUp automation features.
At what point do I need to permanently break up with a subscriber?
It is likely that you will eventually need to say goodbye to some of your subscribers. At some point you have to ask yourself, “Is this relationship doing more harm than good?” If a subscriber has not opened or clicked your emails for an extended period of time—even after putting them through an email re-engagement campaign—it is time to let them go. Those unengaged subscribers are going to eventually be harmful to your delivery reputation and ultimately could prevent your engaged subscribers from receiving their emails. Too many unengaged subscribers will give ISPs the impression that you are not a reputable email sender.
Remember! There are more fish in the sea!
No matter what your industry is, the game is simple: catch more than you lose. Regardless of how amazing your email program is, you will lose subscribers. Make sure you have a solid plan in place to continue to replace the lost subscribers with new subscribers.
Your new subscribers are generally your most engaged users, so grab as many as you can get! Leverage strong email capture practices such as onsite capture widgets to continuously find new subscribers. The PostUp Audience Development team can work with you to create a plan tailored to your subscribers needs and the needs of your website and brand.
How do I set up an email re-engagement program in PostUp?
This is how it should work: using the recurring and targeting features in PostUp, establish a business rule that executes an email on a daily basis to subscribers that have not opened or clicked on your emails in a defined number of days. Each subscriber will only receive one email. If the subscriber opens or clicks, they are considered active, or engaged again. However, if the subscriber does not open or click, they are still considered inactive or un-engaged and should not be mailed. For anyone that needs help setting this up, please reach out to your Account Executive or email us.
So, what are you waiting for? There are inactive subscribers waiting for you to make the first move! Follow these steps and you will be reconnecting in no time. No more excuses, email automation isn’t as hard as you thought it was. Inactive subscribers can still be valuable to your email program – don’t forget to reach out and offer a second chance at winning their affection back.