Inactive subscribers are still engaged

Inactive subscribers are still valuable to your brand and can generate a significant amount of revenue.

It makes perfect sense to stop emailing someone you know would never buy your products again or who actively dislikes receiving your emails. But long-term inactivity isn’t a good indicator of whether someone falls into that category. There are 5 reasons why your subscribers may be – or appear to be – inactive:

  1. They want your email, but haven’t needed your product for a while.
  2. You’re receiving false negatives – your email is optimized to be read with image blocking on, so some subscribers could be opening it without you knowing.
  3. The subscriber doesn’t want your email, but doesn’t care enough to unsubscribe.
  4. Email address churn – the subscriber no longer uses or rarely checks that email address.
  5. They don’t see your email because it goes into the junk folder.

By far the largest group is the first one – we call these people the unemotionally subscribed. They will happily ignore your emails until they’re ready to buy, because it’s easier than unsubscribing and having to remember your URL or Google you later.

We’ve gathered plenty of evidence on this group and demonstrated that while they might not read an email, they’re still a very important customer base. For example:

  • One of our clients generated $120,000 from subscribers who had not opened or clicked on the previous 25 to 40 emails.
  • Another saw 14% of revenue generated by subscribers who did not open or click a single email.

Common marketing advice would have been to delete those subscribers after a year’s inactivity. But by retaining unemotionally subscribed addresses, the client brought in a significant amount of additional revenue.

by DAVE CHAFFEY

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