Email is one of the most effective digital marketing channels for customer retention and operates as the foundation of the marketing-to-sales funnel for many marketers across all industries. However, each year, more than 20% of your email subscribers become inactive.
Today's marketers can't afford to ignore unengaged customers. But they don't have to lie dormant: there is a way to reactivate them and generate additional revenue.
What is a reactivation email?
It is a message sent to these inactive subscribers to re-engage them with your brand's messages. Inactive subscribers are those subscribers who stopped interacting with your email campaigns for a long period of time (6 months, a year, depending on your business).
Why do subscribers become inactive?
For many reasons, but the most common are:
1. The email address is no longer used
People move, companies change names, people get new jobs, email conventions change... and the list goes on. As a result, between 25 and 30% of contact data goes bad every year under normal circumstances. If you have inactive customer records in your database, you'll need to check the deliverability of your emails.
In fact, more than 35% of email marketers say that keeping emails clean and up-to-date is a major challenge in their email marketing programs.
Involuntary subscription
These subscribers gave you their email addresses, but not because they intended to end up on your mailing list. Perhaps they subscribed to receive a special offer or to research options for an important purchase. Once they receive the special offer or the information they were looking for, they stop opening your emails and become inactive. They continue to receive your emails, but have little or no intention of participating.
These types of inactive senders pose a risk to your reputation as a sender and to the deliverability of your emails, because over time they may get tired of receiving news from you and mark your messages as spam.
3. Lost interest
Some subscribers may have opted-in to receive your emails when they found your content useful for certain interests or goals they had at the time. But, over time, their interests and goals change, causing them to become inactive and stop engaging with your emails.
4. SPAM folder
Ending up in the spam folder is every email marketer's greatest fear. Messages falling into the spam folder means that subscribers are unlikely to see your messages and, if they do see them in spam, they will not trust that your message is valid.
Messages that end up in the spam folder are a deliverability problem that must be solved before sending a reactivation campaign. Poor deliverability can be due to several factors, such as sending email attachments, lack of segmentation, use of large images, etc.
Why send a reactivation email?
Inactive subscribers can take a toll on your email marketing campaigns. A reactivation email campaign for inactive subscribers can help your email marketing efforts in several ways:
- Improve your participation statistics
- Improve email deliverability
- Improve email hygiene
- Increasing sales and lead generation
Reactivation email
When using email for reactivation, a multi-faceted approach should be applied to address the challenge of inactive email records, using the following key elements:
1. Identify your inactive subscribers
Determining who your inactive subscribers are will depend largely on how often you send messages. If you send four every month, who your inactive subscribers turn out to be will be different from a brand that sends a couple of emails a year. In MasterBase® you can review your statistics for the last few months and observe the performance of your previous campaigns.
Pay attention to subscribers who have not consistently opened or clicked on your emails. Also, be aware of inactive subscribers who may be engaged with your brand in other ways.
2. Target your inactive subscribers
Once you have identified your inactive subscribers, you will want to add them to a new segment for reactivation. By creating this new segment, you will ensure that reactivation emails are only sent to those inactive subscribers, thus preventing them from accidentally reaching people who have already interacted with your messages.
3. Determine your reactivation criteria
Before you launch your reactivation campaign, you will need to figure out what actions a subscriber must take to be considered "reactivated". For example, if someone opened an email you can consider them reactivated, or you may only want to consider clickers reactivated.
4. Create compelling content
A reactivation campaign typically deploys four or five email messages to reactivate subscribers. When it comes to reactivation emails, relevant and engaging content is key.
One of the most effective ways to get to know your audience better is to simply ask them for demographic information (e.g. age, gender) and their email preferences in your reactivation emails.
5. Build your campaign
It is unlikely that a single reactivation email will be very successful. A reactivation campaign is most effective if it consists of several messages. To do this, you will need to create an automated workflow based on the criteria you selected in step 3.
6. Deploy and test
Don't give up if your emails are not opened immediately. The average time between people receiving a reactivation email and reading a subsequent message can be up to two months.
7. Clean up!
Once your reactivation campaign is over, gather inactive subscribers and unsubscribe them from your list. You can send them a final message beforehand informing them that they will be removed from your list unless they re-subscribe.
