Email marketing depends on subscriber retention, so how to deal with unsubscribers is a frequently asked question. These are people who have subscribed to your email list, but have not viewed your posts in a long time. In this article, we’ll take a look at whether or not it’s time to let go of unsubscribers and how you should handle this segment of your list.
The Advantages of Dropping Dead Subscribers?
Improved Deliverability
Email providers (ESPs) check the response rates of an email list to validate whether a message is legitimate. If a high proportion of a list has been unresponsive, ESPs may flag a sender’s emails as spam and thus lower the deliverability of all emails. Companies can bolster their sender reputation and make it more likely that their emails will be received by their target by regularly eliminating inactive subscribers. This, in turn, can increase open and click-through rates and ultimately, improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Lower Costs
Some email marketing platforms will charge based on the number of subscribers in a list. By automatically purging old subscribers, companies save money and spend their budgets more efficiently. This can mean more money spent on engagement and conversion-producing tactics like subject line optimization, content personalization, and experimenting with send times.
Increased Engagement
Close rates (open and clickthrough) will naturally increase the number of unsubscribers on a list. It gives companies the ability to better understand the success of their campaigns and discover their most responsive and engaged subscribers. Additionally, by eliminating unsubscribers, companies can guard against losing engagement from the resulting high inactive rate and affecting their reputation and deliverability.
Better Data
The cleaner and happier your email lists are, the more accurate the data is to segment, personalize and automate. By severing unsubscribers, companies can make sure that the data they use to guide their marketing strategy is valid and accurate. This can create more targeted campaigns, increased conversions, and higher customer satisfaction.
Benefits of Rejecting Inactive Subscribers Pros
Reduced List Size:
By unsubscribing inactive subscribers, you are inevitably losing subscribers. This decrease in list size can be very damaging to your reach, especially if you have a very small list. A smaller email list might make it difficult to send your message out to as many people as possible, which may decrease your brand’s exposure and opportunities for new customers. Furthermore, a small list can impact your email deliverability, because ISPs consider a small list to be fake and may place your email in spam folders.
Risk of Losing Potential Customers:
When you purge unsubscribers, you risk getting rid of individuals who might have been interested in your goods or services but not interacting with your email messages. These people could still turn into customers in the future, and removing them from your list might decrease this. Additionally, deleting unresponsive subscribers may compromise the credibility of your followers. Subscribers will think your brand is not a good fit if they believe that they’re being unsubscribed.
Time and Resources:
Cleansing your email list frequently takes effort and money. It could mean designing sophisticated re-engagement campaigns, measuring subscriber behavior, and figuring out elaborate strategies to eliminate inactive subscribers. This can be time-consuming and might require the help of a marketing professional or agency. Additionally, it can be expensive to conduct a re-engagement campaign and purge your email list, especially for small businesses with little resources. The effort and time spent cleaning your email list could be more costly than the payoff, especially if your list is not heavily infested with unsubscribers.
How to Handle Non-Active Subscribers Best Practices
1. Define Inactivity
Understanding what counts as inactivity should be the initial goal in managing inactive subscribers. Businesses have different rules depending on the type of business, but the usual methods are to make it a period of inactivity- 60, 90, or 120 days apart. You can also include a combination of variables such as no email open, click or visit. This allows you to have a specific, tangible way of filtering out subscribers who need a little extra attention.
2. Implement Re-Engagement Campaigns
Now, before you make a conscious move to remove an inactive subscriber from your database, run a reengagement flow. Perhaps it’s a three-mail cycle of custom, high-quality content, discount codes or personalized incentives to lure them back in again. These emails should tell the subscriber what they are missing and why they should care, along with an explicit call to action. Indeed, if you give reengagement time, you can actually revive a few subscribers.
3. Gradual Sunsetting
So instead of shutting down your cold subscriber list in one shot, you have to go about it one step at a time. You would do this by shifting your non-responders into a slower mailing frequency or an unmarketable email drip sequence. This way, you can keep your list warm without stressing these subscribers. By tiers, sunsetting, in addition to cutting costs, will keep you in touch with these subscribers who may at some point in the future begin engaging with your material again.
4. Analyze and Monitor
Monitoring your email list on a regular basis gives you an insight into patterns in what activities subscribers are putting together. With deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and engagement levels as the primary measures, you will be able to know if your re-engagement campaigns have succeeded. Working from this data, you might be able to discern trends that will help you understand what’s working for you going forward and then hone in on what’s effective for you at the present time. This then allows you to continually observe in order to implement meaningful change and take advantage of opportunities to better target your campaigns.
5. Keep the Human Touch
If it’s time to part ways with those really inactive subscribers, make sure you do so sincerely and respectfully. Send one last email informing them of any upcoming products, services or contents you may have. This should also make it crystal clear why removing them from your list was needed to maintain a strong brand and reputation. This way, there’s a last chance for them to revisit your brand, and at the very least keep their experience with your brand going strong.
Conclusion:
Removing dead email addresses from your list can help, but the answer really comes down to your specific situation. You need to keep in mind your list size, budget, marketing objectives, and the risk of losing dead leads. You can make smart choices about how to retain healthy, engaged subscribers and improve the efficiency of your email marketing campaign by embracing best practices when it comes to sifting through inactive subscribers and continuously monitoring your list.
