Inactive subscribers are those subscribers who are detrimental to your brand or business. These subscribers do not open or click on your emails within a specified time frame and have a significant impact on your email marketing program. When you have too many inactive subscribers, it can lead to reduced deliverability, inaccurate analysis, and overall reduced ROI. It makes them a lost opportunity instead of a successful venture. It is imperative to your marketing strategy to define the time frame based on your customer lifecycle.
What is the primary cause of inactivity among your email subscribers?
Before we look into the various ways you can identify and reduce your inactive email subscribers, it can be beneficial to know about the leading cause for the inactivity. Some of the significant reasons for inactivity among your email subscribers are:
- The right acquisition source
- The correct date for the acquisition
- Understanding the customer journey
- Changes in the product or service
- The particular timeframe of inactivity
- Changes in the email marketing program
What are the various ways you can reduce the number of inactive email subscribers?
Once you can identify the root causes, you will need to develop programs to reduce the percentage of customers who can eventually become dormant. It might also include eliminating specific acquisition sources or approaches, altering free trial programs, or even changing your email cadence. You might consider increasing the use of dynamic content and personalization, based on capturing more customer data upfront or inferring from their pre-opt-in behavior. Another tip that you can consider is managing new subscribers’ expectations with a multi-email onboarding series instead of just a welcome email.
It is essential to initiate an early warning system that uses analytics in scoring and identifying inactive contacts. It would be best if you considered moving all of the communications into an activation track to engage them with different types of content. It might include updating preferences or even completing a survey.
b. Removing your inactive email subscribers:
The next step may prove to be incredibly difficult. It can prove to be entirely political, as subscribers will have to be removed or suppressed from the database. If subscribers haven’t made a purchase or opened your emails within the last three years, you may consider deleting all of the subscribers.
Especially those who haven’t made a purchase or opened an email within this timeframe, you are improving deliverability. You can also gain a better sense of how exactly your database is performing.
The smartest approach you can take is to leverage your artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. The tool used to determine your most inactive segments that are most likely to be purchased in the future.
However, machine-based predictions are not mainly known for their accuracy. They provide a compelling data-driven method of deciding who to keep and who to let go. It is crucial to understand how email subscribers interact, particularly with the brand, especially on other channels.
Emails are exactly like billboards in how they work, especially when your subscribers do not open their messages. It is beneficial to keep reminding your customers as well. Directly sending out an email and asking them to click on a link to opt-out for your email marketing campaigns will go a long way toward cost-cutting and saving money.
In case you do choose you to want to remove customers from your active database. You should send them an email asking them to click a link to receive your emails before eventually suppressing them.
c. Rethink/Revise: The final step in the entire process to quickly identify and reduce the overall levels in the process. Almost all brands tend to have a sizable percentage of subscribers who go inactive each year. Still, if the rate of inactivity has been increasing or just merely becoming significantly large, it’s probably time to rethink your entire approach to email marketing.
Final Thoughts:
In conclusion, these are the various ways you can successfully identify and reduce the overall number of inactive email subscribers. Share your opinion and comment or provide some feedback on how you enjoyed reading this article on inactive email subscribers. When you follow these steps, you are saving your money in your email marketing campaigns by getting rid of your inactive email subscribers.
Good luck with your future email marketing campaigns. Thanks for reading!
