If you’ve heard it once you’ve heard it umpteen times: It’s cheaper to reactivate a current customer than it is to win a new customer. And when it comes to email subscribers, reactivation is doubly important: If a significant portion of your email file deletes your messages without looking at them, ISPs and mailbox providers could begin automatically directly all your outbound emails into the spam folder or, worse, could block you altogether.
In the second article in our two-part focus on reengaging inactive email subscribers, we asked Andrea Scarnecchia, vice president of marketing at Lyris, for some advice.
For starters, you need to identify your inactive subscribers. But while the need to do this is obvious, determining who needs to be reengaged can be tricky. It’s not as cut-and-dried as looking at who hasn’t opened or clicked through an email in the past 90 days; much depends on how frequently you communicate via email. “If they haven’t opened any of your last 10 or so emails, that’s definitely somebody who’s an inactive,” Scarnecchia says.
But if you send only one enewsletter a month, you don’t want to wait 10 months before deeming someone an inactive. Then, too, because many inboxes register as an open any email that appears in the user’s preview pane, an email that was technically opened may not have actually been acted upon by the recipient.
“What you’re looking for is a pattern that can’t be explained from some other excuse, such as a vacation,” Scarnecchia says.
Or, for that matter, a change in the format of your emails. Switching from text to HTML, or vice versa, can result in an increase in inactive subscribers. “It’s the first thing we look at,” says Scarnecchia.
Once you’ve defined inactives and identified those who fit the description, “look for a common trait among them,” Scarnecchia suggests. “Are they all coming from a particular ISP, which may be blocking you?” If that’s the case, working with the ISP could resolve the problem.
“Or maybe they’re all within a certain vertical or from a certain locale,” Scarnecchia continues. “Also, check the source of the inactives; maybe those who came from a certain list or campaign are much more likely to be inactive than others. If you can break down the commonalities, you can work toward a solution.”
The solution may vary depending on those commonalities. Say a significant percentage of your inactives are subscribers you acquired from a deep-discount Website. It would probably take emails offering sales to gain their interest, so you might want to segment them out of your main email file and contact them only when you’re running clearances. Or say a number of those who haven’t opened in several months are from the South; perhaps your messages have been promoting parkas or snowblowers, items that they have no need for or interest in. Again, you’d want to better target your emails to those customers.
In short, “make sure you’re getting the kind of offer to people that they care about,” Scarnecchia says.
One way to improve the targeting of your messages is by encouraging inactives to update their profiles in your email preference center. Your message could be along the lines of “We noticed you haven’t opened your emails in a while. Why not provide us with your preferences so that we can send you only information you really want?”
Given that these subscribers haven’t been opening your emails, you may not be able to reactivate them via this medium. “Maybe try to reengage with them via direct mail and reincent them by saying that they can get better deals via email,” Scarnecchia suggests.
One more piece of advice: “You might want to separate the tough-to-convert inactives and look at the metrics from your actives separately so that you can track performance more accurately.”
