4 Offers To Revive Dead Email Subscribers

There are people in every email marketing list that have stopped paying attention. They’re still subscribed, but they’ve checked out and are no longer reading your messages.

Chris Marriott at iMediaConnection.com recently wrote an article exploring different ways that you can reactivate these dead subscribers. In the excerpt from the article included below, he suggests four offers that you may want to try if your list has a lot of non-engaged subscribers:

1. One-time discount or gift with purchase.
   “Those who employ this tactic should do so with the understanding that they may be training their customers to wait for better offers, but some revenue beats no revenue. Also, this option allows marketers to test the value of different kinds of incentives (10 percent off vs. free shipping, etc.).
2. Survey.
   Give customers the ability to sound off about what they like and dislike about the email and to recommend content they may like. This approach works best if the marketer can use survey responses as preferences. For instance, if the customer merely wants less email, the marketer must have the ability to reduce frequency for this approach to work best.
3. Reduced frequency.
   If a marketer has stuck to a single cadence for his or her emails, then the living dead may respond to a change in frequency. Even unengaged consumers notice when a regular email disappears from their inboxes and then reappears.
4. Interest check.
   Very often, the simple approach of asking subscribers if they still want to receive the email works well. This approach may involve sending a simple postcard-style email with the single call to action of “click here to continue receiving these emails.” A more subtle approach in this vein may involve changing only the subject line to remind users what they receive. For one retail bank client, we changed the subject line of a newsletter from the branded name for the newsletter to “your June newsletter from [bank name].”

However, as Andrew Kordek at The Scrappy Email Marketer points out, these kind of campaigns are extremely difficult to pull off.