Email marketing is one of the most cost effective channels for outreach. But because it is so inexpensive, almost every digital marketer dabbles with email marketing.
Eventually that creates a lot of noise, making it harder for any email marketer to get serious attention from his audience.
Even if you write top quality content in your newsletters, you are bound to have some people in your mailing list who will stop opening your emails after a while. Sometimes this is just because of the overwhelming volume of emails that they get on daily basis. It is very easy for your emails to get lost in that noise.
So what to with these dormant email subscribers and how to re engage them?
Liability of dormant email subscribers
When an email subscriber becomes dormant, he stops opening any of your emails. That clearly decreases the reach and productivity of your email campaigns. But furthermore, it can be a big liability to have these dormant accounts on your mailing lists.
The deliverability of your marketing emails and cold emails depends a lot on your sender reputation score.
Your sender reputation in turn depends on the track record of how your recipients are engaging with your emails. If too many of your emails start to get bounced, deleted or ignored, your sender reputation will suffer.
When dormant email subscribers stop opening and reading your emails, they will negatively impact your sender reputation. In other words, they become a huge liability for your email marketing campaigns.
Why you need to re engage dormant email subscribers
It is not only ineffective to send new emails to dormant subscribers, but rather it is detrimental to your email sending reputation.
Instead, it is better to remove these dormant subscribers from the main mailing list and try to re engage them via some other means.
Removing them from your mailing list will ensure that your emails are only sent to people who are actively engaging with them. It will help to ensure consistently high email open rates and a healthy sender reputation score.
A higher sender reputation will in turn ensure that more of your emails land in inbox and are opened.
How to recycle dormant subscribers till they are engaged again
If you don’t send any emails to these dormant email subscribers, then what do you do with them?
You don’t want to just throw them away. Remember you must have invested significant marketing dollars to get them to sign up for your newsletter in the first place. You don’t want to simply throw away that investment.
Instead try to re engage these dormant email subscribers by some other means. Clearly they have stopped paying attention to your emails. So it is time to try some other channels.
Re-marketing ad campaigns
Try re-marketing ad campaigns on Google Adwords or Facebook. Since you already have their email accounts, you can use them to create custom audiences in Google Adwords or Facebook.
These remarketing ads can be incredibly effective, because you are specifically targeting people who have already shown affinity to your products earlier, but for some reason have forgotten about it.
Remarketing ads give you a way to remind them why they need your products/services. So it is important that you also write your ad copy with this factor in mind.
If they click on the remarketing ad and come to your website / store, you can start re engaging them with your regular marketing emails.
Secondary email lists
Quite often people stop reading your regular marketing emails, because they already know what to expect inside. They become too familiar with all your marketing material.
In that case you can move them to a separate secondary email list where you only send very important updates like – signing up a big customer, new breakthrough features, special milestone achievements.
Basically anything that is newsworthy.
If you send these emails once every 3-4 months, even some of the dormant subscribers will take note. Maybe they will rediscover why they used to love your product and come back to your business.
Create variations of your newsletters
Some of the dormant subscribers may actually be just too overwhelmed by the volume of your emails. For example, if you send daily / weekly newsletters, it may be too much for some people.
So find out if that is the case. Send them a survey when you see a dip in their engagement with your email content. Ask them if they would like to receive a monthly or quarterly newsletter instead of daily/weekly.
Take use this opportunity to gather more feedback. Try to understand why they are not engaging with your content as much as they used to. This will help in reducing the churn in future.
Basically, all of your subscribers are not the same. By creating multiple newsletter subscription plans, you give them an opportunity to choose an option more suited to them.
Doing all of these manually can be quite strenuous. So it is advisable to make use of email marketing automation tools to run and optimize your email campaigns for maximum effectiveness. That should help you to periodically identify dormant subscribers in your mailing list and recycle them through one or more re engagement channels.