70-75% of Email Subscribers are Inactive: Tips for Improvements

The Challenge: Per recent guidelines, you will be penalized if your emails do not have adequate levels of deliverability and “engagement”. Consider the following options to optimize your lists to increase open rates and engagement.

New rules regarding deliverability and engagement

Per our previous blog, recently most email service providers converted to a new algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new “engagement” factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. With these new human behaviors factored into the equation of deliverability, future emails that you send may be considered SPAM or not delivered at all, even to subscribers who signed-up to receive your emails.

70-75% of most email subscribers are inactive

List hygiene is not just about removing undeliverable emails, bounces and unsubscribes. It is also requires re-engaging inactive subscribers and the tricky task of asking subscribers if they still want to receive your emails. It’s scary to think about getting people to unsubscribe, but is necessary in today’s email climate; especially when you consider that 70 – 75% of most email subscribers are inactive. It becomes a waste of resources, money, and hurts the overall deliverability of your list.

When you remove inactives and non-responders there a number of added benefits to your email campaign. In addition to a better delivery rate, you will have lowered costs and increased ease of segmentation and analysis. Not only are you paying to send to these subscribers, you are wasting time managing a larger email list, and then you are penalized for sending too many emails that are left unopened and unengaged.

Re-engagement campaigns

Instead of just purging inactive subscribers, you should first test a re-engagement campaign. Pulling one off tactfully requires finesse. This is easier when you know your audience and run test campaigns to see which tactic performs best. Some ideas for re-engagement emails are to include catchy subject lines such as:

“Are You Breaking Up With Us?”

“Are we still friends?”

“Are You Mad at Us?

The body of the email should explain the message and provide multiple options: opt-out, and various ways to opt-in: subscribe to only some topics, adjust frequency, or connect on different platforms and social arenas.

TAKEAWAYS FOR EMAIL MARKETERS:

» Start your email relationship effectively: capture attention and invite engagement with a quality welcome series.

» Test to determine the most important areas of interest. This should drive engaging content and subject lines.

» Segment and personalize your emails so you deliver the greatest relevance to each individual subscriber.

» Analyze inactive users and begin sending re-engagement emails as soon as possible so that inactive users do not remain on your list for too long.

Spike in Email Undeliverables: 5 Tips for Increasing Delivery

The Challenge: Major email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL have implemented new algorithms for email deliverability based on “engagement”. If your emails are not triggering sufficient interaction, they are likely not to be delivered.

Recently, most email service providers have converted to a new customized algorithm that calculates deliverability using a combination of the original email delivery rules plus new “engagement” factors: open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, and complaints. With these new human behaviors factored into the equation of deliverability, future emails that you send may be considered SPAM or not delivered at all, even to subscribers who signed-up to receive your emails. Email marketing service MailChimp explains an even more damaging point “if enough recipients click the ‘spam’ button on your email, the providers assume that no one else would want that email either.” Read Google’s white paper on deliverability and the Priority Inbox.

What can you do to improve engagement? Here are 5 tactics:

1. At a minimum, follow basic list management best practices, such as keeping your list opt-in only, honor unsubscribe requests and remove undelivered emails from your list. MailChimp suggests using a double opt-in method to further improve engagement metrics.

2. Motivate new customers to engage with you. Silverpop recommends a quality welcome series.

3. The strategists at Econsultancy suggest “Combining behavioral data and RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) creates Engagement-RFM (eRFM). Using this methodology can improve the accuracy of segmentation, strengthen influence and engagement, and lead to an increased ROI.”

4. Use personalization and dynamic content. Leverage this information to deploy personalized communications for significant events such as customer appreciation messages, unexpected “surprise and delight” communications, birthdays, post purchase “thank-you’s”, and dropped cart messages.

5. Reward email actions like opens, clicks, and shares. Marketing Profs highlights how companies like GameStop and Southwest Airlines are experiencing success with engagement by tracking subscriber’s interactions and awarding loyalty program points.

Key Takeaways:

1. Sending “spray and pray” emails will damage your brand, hurt your reputation, and compromise future deliverability of legitimate emails.

2. Provide value-added information. Per recent findings from recent Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, customers are willing to provide in-depth information in exchange for receiving value-added information. For consumers, the rationale for providing preference information is to receive increasingly relevant offers, communications, and experiences.

3. Segmentation is more essential than ever. Develop increasingly specific customer and prospect segments so you can send highly targeted emails that are of interest to each recipient in your sub-segmented groups.