We have already written about email marketing and how to measure its effectiveness. But there is one more thing we want to take a closer look at. Every entrepreneur knows that keeping current customers is more effective and effortless than finding new ones. The same thing applies to email subscribers. That’s why in today’s article we will talk about how to identify inactive subscribers and what to do to reactivate them.
Who are inactive subscribers
No matter how interesting and useful your newsletters are, there are always people who want to unsubscribe from them. This is normal and not something you should be afraid of. Let us firstly identify the inactive subscribers. Subscribers who have zero engagement with the company’s email marketing campaigns for a certain period of time fall into this category. The period of time and zero engagement differ from company to company and are determined independently for every business. For instance, for one company inactive period is one year because they send one email per month, while another company sends one email every week and considers the inactive period to be no longer than three months. A similar situation is with the level of engagement: someone focuses on the open rate, while others monitor the click-through rate. There is no universal advice — everything depends on the business.
Why is it so important to identify inactive subscribers? You spend a certain amount of time, effort and money to create and launch an email campaign, but a number of people that are not interested in it, delete it without reading or clicking the “spam” button. Are you OK with it? We think the answer is obvious.
How to re-engage customers
There are several types of reactivation campaigns depending on the stage of zero engagement: early, middle and late. Let’s dive into each of them.
- Early activation campaign. This type includes interaction with new subscribers. Once you receive a notification of subscription, you should cooperate with your client immediately. The simplest way to do it is to send a thank you email. These emails are supposed to build a trusting relationship with customers. Send links to social networks or suggest special offers for first-time subscribers to interest or motivate your client. Such letters usually have good KPIs and contribute to establishing trusting relationships between your ID and the email provider.
- Middle activation campaign. Many subscribers become inactive over time. They have already bought the product they were interested in and have your newsletters for later. To shake up this group you can launch a user survey and ask customers to update their preferences. By doing this you will get more detailed information about your clients, understand what emails they want to receive and when. This data will be useful for creating your target audience portrait which is extremely important in ecommerce business.
- Late activation campaign. If you have subscribers that are inactive for more than a year, there is still something you can do. Firstly, send a special email with a unique offer, a discount or a gift. If it doesn’t work, notify your subscriber that he will be removed from the mailing list if he doesn’t reply to this email. After all, if nothing works don’t be afraid to clean the list of followers.
Remember, that it is necessary to respond to unsubscription. The best way you can do it is to send kind, funny and sincere farewell email. What can be included to this email:
- a five-minute survey to know the reason for unsubscription;
- the benefits of your newsletters;
- social media buttons;
- a “renew the subscription” button.
Email marketing is still a working and useful tool. Take it seriously, add a little bit of creativity and you will get great results.
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