How to reawaken dormant subscribers & revive a failing email program
- Updated on: 2019-03-26
- Read original article here
If you ever wanted to play the role of big-time email marketing consultant, now’s your chance. Grab a pencil, a piece of paper and maybe a calculator, and take a whack at helping a brand get its email program back on track.
The brand is Olive Street Toys. No, you haven’t heard of it because it doesn’t exist. However, the numbers in this simulated case study come from actual client work and were used in a recent brainstorming exercise among members of the Only Influencers email community.
Read the case study first. You’ll see that Olive Street Toys faces falling open and click rates, among other issues, and has a high percentage of inactive, or dormant, subscribers. I’ll present my approach to resolving OST’s email issues below, and then I would love to hear how you would advise the brand’s marketing team.
In our experience, the leading factor resulting in dormant subscribers is simply that companies are emailing these subscribers at email accounts they no longer read.
From 20% to 30% of an email list churns every year (often more than that). Many marketers turn to reactivation programs, but these usually generate minimal returns if they don’t incorporate an Email Change of Address (ECOA) service.
ECOA ensures that your re-engagement emails reach people at their preferred email addresses, rather than landing in dead, unread email boxes.
OST should take one last stab at reawakening its dormant subscribers with a compelling subject line and an attractive offer. If that doesn’t generate a response, OST should look to update its inactive and bouncing email addresses with an ECOA service before removing them from the list.
This will enable the brand to leverage its marketing spend, reconnect with lost customers, and drive the ROI and revenues it seeks.
Three schools of thought have emerged concerning the best way to wake up their sleeping subscribers. However, each one has a serious flaw.
OST invested heavily to acquire these subscribers/customers. Why throw away this asset when you can reconnect with them at a fraction of the cost of acquiring new subscribers/customers?
Reducing frequency will waste money on messaging costs without generating much new activity, if any. The low sending frequency will most likely result in these emails being relegated to junk folders, assuming they even get delivered at all.
Finally, a basic marketing adage is that you need to send 5-7 marketing messages before you can get somebody’s attention – minimizing frequency goes against this basic marketing principle.
Given the long-standing dormant history resulting from sending to dead email accounts or whatever, continued sends will not achieve OST’s re-engagement goals.
Further, this will be a waste of money and the lack of engagement could damage OST’s sending reputation, thereby reducing the effectiveness of their overall email marketing program.
The out-of-pocket costs of continually emailing dormant subscribers is relatively small, but the risks of hitting a spamtrap or exceeding ISPs’ stringent spam complaint thresholds from messaging dead or recycled addresses are real.
Don’t just discard your dormant subscribers. You can still generate significant revenue from them. Rather, try an aggressive offer to see if you can awaken these sleeping bears.
For the ones who snooze on, try something different, like re-engaging them at their current, preferred email addresses through ECOA. As Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
How would you handle the email issues Olive Street Toys (or maybe even your own email program) is facing? Read the case study, jot down your thoughts, and post them below. I’m looking forward to seeing them!
