Inactives - what to do about them

January 2008

Considering that 30-50% of a database is made up of inactives - at first glance inactives can seem like a considerable problem and certainly one worthy of looking further into. Marketing Sherpa found that open rates are the highest in the first 30 days after a recipient joins your list - the open rate can be up to 58%. 6 months down the line however, the open rate has settled down to 37%. So what's happening to the rest of them? Why are they no longer interested?

The way I see it, inactives are made up of recipients who fall into 2 main groups:

1: Those who are referred to a 'Bacn'.
2: Those who are referred to as being 'Emotionally Unsubscribed'

Let's review each in turn.
Bacn: The term Bacn was originally coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh 2 in August 2007. The definition of this term is being 'email you want- but not right now'. My good friend Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx, likes to thinkof this group as being 'Unemotionally Subscribed', and he believes it is key to stay in touch.

An example of these recipients are those who will want to buy at some stage and are happy to continue receiving your emails until they are ready to purchase. This often happens with companies with long sales cycles, or in a very competitive market where the purchaser hops from company to company. In their minds it's called research and in your mind, it's called 'keeping your company top of their mind for when they're ready to buy.'

Emotionally Unsubscribed: This term is being used to define those recipients who haven't physically bothered to unsubscribe and are most likely deleting it as soon as it appears in the inbox - or have blocked in within their email client so that it doesn't even arrive in their inbox.
Return Path found that the percentage of professionals who bother to unsubscribe from email they no longer want was 22%. Therefore, consider your unsubscribes to be only one-quarter of the real picture!!

However this group may not be as harmless as you think. Not only do inactives negatively impact upon your campaign statistics but they can also negatively affect your sending reputation. Michelle Eichner, CEO Pivotal Veracity recently stated; "If mailers did an analysis of those who unsubscribe or those who report them as spammers, they would find that a very large percentage of them are coming from that inactive file."

Within his research, Jakob Nielsen found that many users fail to unsubscribe for one of the following reasons:

1: Emotional Attachment to the Newsletter
2: Low expectations of usability i.e. too difficult to unsubscribe
3: Fear that unsubscribing wouldn't work.

So, what to do?

The question often arises - should these inactives be culled? Well, I'm afraid to say that the jury is out on that one and I don't believe there is a 'one size fits all' answer for this. Recently we had an 'inactive' call us up and say that he is now ready for our services...12 months later! Would he have called us if we weren't 'top of mind' and still sending him communications? So why not try to re-engage their interest? As Marketing Sherpa says in their Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008; "If your success is judged by your results, it's to your benefit to bring inactives back into the fold by sending them unique content or surveying them."

Re-engage Your Inactives

Try segmenting your list into actives and inactives so you can analyse the statistics better as well as experiment with the following ideas:

Re-design the email and announce it in the subject line. Something new and fresh and different may pique their interest.
Send a special offer such as a white paper etc
Make an offer i.e. 20% or 2 for 1 to this group.
Ask them what you can do to improve - sometimes it's just a matter of the information not being relevant to their situation, sometimes it's a matter of frequency; i.e. are you mailing to them often or not enough?
Try sending on a different day or time of month. We changed recently from sending at the end of the month to sending mid month to avoid sending at the same time as all of our competitors – which increased our active readership.
Send different content to the inactives, including testing & experimenting with subject lines.

After everything has been tried (and the list above is certainly not exhaustive), move those who have re-engaged to your active list(s) and consider emailing to the inactives less frequently.

The benefits of re-engaging and reducing inactives

Reduced complaints and increased deliverability - complaints are one of the key factors which contribute to your reputation score with ISP’s and have a direct effect on deliverability.
Improved statistics - by reducing the inactives you have automatically improved your statistics.
Increased ROI - if the same people are opening the emails (or possibly more if your deliverability has increased) then it makes sense that your ROI will increase, as you will be sending fewer emails

So sure, it takes a bit more work, but what's the worst that can happen? You'll reduce your complaints and costs, have more active readers as well as improving your results.

Kath Pay is Managing Director of Ezemail, an innovative company that provides comprehensive email marketing solutions. For more information on how easily email marketing can be implemented, please contact Kath at kath@ezemail.com.

©Kath Pay 2008