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• Demographics/past purchases: You sell
children’s books. I haven’t bought a book
for five years, yet you still send me kiddielit
emails. Hmm.
When you understand the commonalities that
make up these inactive segments, you can start
to fix the problems in your emails that encourage
inactivity.
3. Reactivation programs usually don’t
work well.
Many marketers tell me their reactivation programs
bring only 1 percent to 2 percent of their
inactives back from the dead. Some are more
successful, others less so.
What are your prospects? Let’s do some math:
Suppose that 30 percent, or 300,000, of your 1
million subscribers are inactive. Now, suppose
your reactivation program successfully re-engages
2 percent, or 6,000 inactives.
Yes, those 6,000 resurrected subscribers
represent 6,000 potential revenue-producing
customers. But wouldn’t you rather spend your
limited time and resources on generating more
revenue from your 700,000 active subscribers?
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to wake up
your zombies. Just be realistic about the potential.
4. Focus on minimizing inactivity from
the beginning.
If you don’t want to watch 30 percent to 40
percent or more of your database go inactive,
you must work to keep them engaged.
Here a few quick actions:
• Identify the commonalities and characteristics,
if any, of your inactive subscribers and
take corrective actions.
• Launch a welcome and onboarding program
or improve your current one. Get new subscribers
engaged – and purchasing if possible
– as quickly as possible.
• Capture and use meaningful data to deploy
targeted and segmented programs.
• Launch one-to-one triggered programs such
as bounce-back, cart abandonment, replenishment/reorder,
birthday, purchase anniversary
and reviews/recommendations.
• Implement automated programs or tracks
that deliver relevant content based on the
customer’s stage in the buying cycle, interests
or actions.
• Enable change-of-email address, interest,
frequency and mailing-list changes via a
world-class preference center.
• Test content approaches, design, cadence
and other factors that continue to increase
engagement and ROI.
Although it’s entertaining to debate whether you
should suppress or send more or send less email
to inactives, I say let’s get to work and focus instead
on reducing the number of subscribers who
go inactive.
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