Email subscriber list management: Don’t forget your middle child

The middle child on your email subscriber list needs some attention.

Those high-achieving oldest children—email subscribers who are active, engaged and likely to purchase—garner a lot of praise and interest. And a good amount of time is spent worrying about those rebellious younger children—those subscribers who have officially opted out.

But what about those who are technically subscribed to your emails, but are inactive and uninterested? These subscribers quickly delete your emails without reading them, but haven’t taken the effort to opt-out. It’s time to think about those middle children, or the “emotionally unsubscribed” as marketing blogger Joanna Lawson Matthew calls them.

Re-engaging Your Email Subscriber List

Matthew suggests first identifying those subscribers by segmenting your list to determine who hasn’t opened or clicked on any of your emails in a given timeframe, based on your email frequency. The next step is to re-engage those middle children, the emotionally unsubscribed group.

Matthew offers 3 ideas for doing so:

1. Send a series of 3-5 re-opt-in engagement messages to the emotionally unsubscribed group. Remind them of who you are and restate the value of your emails. When the re-engagement effort ends, remove anyone from your email subscriber list who hasn’t re-opted in. But be mindful that with this highly aggressive measure, you could lose a lot of email addresses—typically 70-75%.
2. Bring a sense of urgency to your email campaign. Think, “Your subscription will soon end! Act now to renew!” Communicate to the group that they will miss out on useful information and offerings if they don’t act quickly.
3. Segment the emotionally unsubscribed from your regular email subscriber list. Consider cutting back on frequency for this group and offering them a special whitepaper or free trial of your product. Or, send this group a survey to find out exactly what they want.

Re-engagement in Action

Perricone MD, a skincare products provider, is a terrific example of a successful email subscriber re-engagement effort. Before the campaign, many customers were no longer engaged or purchasing. Perricone MD experienced deliverability problems because those emotionally unsubscribed customers were driving up spam complaints.

To identify engaged customers and reconnect with dormant customers, Perricone MD:

• Worked with iPost to refine its use of Google Analytics, fully implement the strategy and train Perricone MD on using the analytics to create new email campaigns.
• Implemented iPost Autotarget™ to automatically identify the engaged and unengaged subscribers, based on their actual subscriber behavior, and segment the email subscriber list to reach out to each group appropriately.
• Increased the frequency of email to the engaged customers.
• Developed a “trial-size” offer program to entice the emotionally unsubscribed customers, the unengaged portion of the list.

As a result, Perricone MD increased its revenues and interaction from unengaged subscribers without risks to deliverability. Learn more about the re-engagement campaign in this case study.

How engaged and emotionally subscribed is your email subscriber list? Now may be the perfect time to consider a re-engagement strategy to help those middle children follow in the footsteps of their older siblings.

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Filed under Email Campaign Strategy, Email Delivery, Email Marketing ROI. Tagged: email marketing, segmentation.