Rekindle the Love: How to Re-engage Inactive Email Subscribers

3 minute read

Upland Admin

No matter how much you love your email subscribers, sometimes they don’t always love you back.  Or maybe it’s not that they don’t love you, maybe they just needed to take a short break.  Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your email program – don’t forget to reach out and offer a second chance at winning their affection back.

How can I show email love to inactive subscribers and avoid a permanent breakup?

If you have not done so yet, create an email program that’s specifically designed to engage with your inactive email subscribers.  Ideally, this should be an automated program and require a low level of ongoing effort and maintenance.

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 X 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.

What will make a subscriber want to love me again?

Give them reasons to want to once again become engaged.  Reinvigorate interest with upcoming deals or specials you may be having.  You can also include a discount or offer to entice them to re-engage with you immediately.  If your brand has anything you can give away in the form of a raffle or sweepstakes, leverage those incentives as well.  For publishers, consider asking for updates to your subscriber’s profile, send subscription reminders, or ask the subscriber to participate in a survey.  And don’t forget to keep your message concise and relevant with a clear call to action.

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, and 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 user 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 inactives, create a plan with your PostUp delivery consultant who can help you avoid mistakes that are commonly made with re-engagement campaigns.  Your delivery consultant can help you create a plan, test that plan and then guide you to create the re-engagement program leveraging PostUp automation features.  In the meantime, be sure download our free Deliverability Solution Guide to rekindle that connection between your emails and the inbox.

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