Reactivate your dormant subscribers with email campaigns

Are you asking yourself why some people never open your emails? Do you try to find out how to convince more users to open your emails? You can do this using reactivation campaigns, sent to inactive customers.

What is reactivating dormant subscribers?

Dormant subscribers are re-engage with inactive subscribers so they start reading your emails again?

First, remember that you can’t reactivate 100% of your inactive subscribers. Some of the reasons:

• people change their email addresses (some are work emails)
• people needs permanently change, so you might not provide a solution for them anymore.

First define what an inactive mailboxes is. Usually those are email addresses that haven’t been used in 30 days or more.

So you will need to segment emails who do not open and do not click an email in the past 30 days.  

Usually about 10 to 12% is the open rate of emails for this type of campaigns. Because it’s so low, it’s not recommended to try to win them back very often. There are many factors that come into play with the expected response rate for your win-back campaigns. These include the source of the email address, for how long they have been subscribed, if they are customers or only subscribers, how long they have been inactive, and your service traditional buying cycle.

Advantages of reactivating old email addresses

Trying to reactivate those emails with a clear message for this will have some good benefits.

• lower the costs for sending emails (list size is smaller and you send fewer emails)
• increase the user base with those that will start reading your emails again.

How to create a win-back email campaign

It costs 6-7x more to gain a new customer than keep an existing one, so developing email marketing campaigns to win back lost subscribers makes a lot of sense.

Now you want to create a reactivation campaign.

Here are some key notes you need to remember:

1. Decide the inactivity period (30days) and segment your users accordingly;
2. Choose the type of message for the email: give incentives, show appreciation or just highlight what they are missing;
3. Send the campaign
4. Give users more time to engage with the campaign and don’t remove them immediately. About 50% of those who open the email will do it within 30 days, not immediately.