3 Simple Ways to Reactivate & Engage Your Subscribers

Author: Gautam Mane

Teaser: It is not enough to add more subscribers to your mailing list. You also need to take good care of the existing subscribers. Here’s how.

When you are sending emails to current and prospective customers on a regular basis, it is easy to get into the trap of ‘bigger is better’. Many digital marketers think that the longer the mailing list is, the better will be the ROI.

While it is always a good idea to add more subscribers, it is equally important to watch your tail and ensure that the subscribers enlisted earlier do not fade away. Inactive email subscribers are as useful to a company as the active ones, and can’t be allowed to go away.

Marketers might think that they may not have enough time to add new subscribers while keeping earlier subscribers engaged. But that is a myth. With a few simple techniques, you can ensure that your subscribers do not become inactive as you go about adding new subscribers to your repository.

Don’t worry too much

The first and most interesting thing about email marketing is how we define the word ‘inactive’. By definition, almost 60% of the email recipients of any campaign are what we call inactive. They might not respond, not open your email, or not click anywhere.

But the interesting thing is that when they need to buy something from you, they will surely come back to you. The fact that they are ‘inactive’ might not always mean that you have also lost them as customers. So, in such situations, what does a marketer do?

Ferret out a list of clients who have purchased from you before, and send them personalized mails starting with ‘Hi Jack’, for example. Those of them who respond are actually active, and you can stop counting them as part of your ‘inactive’ list.

Be generous, stay relevant and useful

Most email marketing campaigns slowly degenerate into sales pitches which not only sound similar to each other but also get monotonous after a while.

If someone has voluntarily signed up for your newsletter, it is clear that he or she is interested in your products. But if you keep bombarding them with information about your latest product releases week after week, at one point the interest will begin to wane.

You need to also give your subscribers something useful. For example, you could write about industry trends, relevant socio economic news, or even useful information from competitors, if you are confident enough about your own products. Selfishly writing only about yourself will mean that your subscribers will continue to lose interest, and inactive subscribers will not come back.

Take a step back

This takes us back to the point we discussed earlier about ‘bigger and better’. Just like some marketers become too focused on adding new subscribers, there are others who become too aggressive in sending their emails. This often leads to ‘email fatigue’ on the part of the recipients. This will automatically push some subscribers from the ‘engaged’ list to the ‘inactive’ list.

You should gauge your recipients and understand whether a weekly mailer suits your product profile or once in a fortnight is good enough. Once in a while you should stop sending that email so that your subscribers wonder ‘when will the next email come?’ instead of groaning ‘oh no, not again!’.

When you begin to fear that your subscriber base is losing out subscribers faster than you can add them, you can follow these 3 simple ways to revitalize your inactive subscribers.

As you would see, these 3 steps would neither take up your money nor your time, but they would help in keeping your mailing list healthy. This will enable your mailing list to continue being the biggest driver for customer acquisition and retention.