• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 7, 2016

If you notice a subscriber begins interacting with your inbound email less, it’s probably best to keep it to yourself and find another way of re-engaging them. To do explicitly communicate that behavior -- or lack thereof -- with a subscriber would be pretty “ball” and most likely ineffective, Ryan Phelan, vice president-marketing insight at Adestra, noted during Day Two of the Email Insider Summit on Amelia Island, Fl, this morning.

If you do acknowledge the subscriber’s waning email interaction, “You’ve got to work on the tone of that message,” he said. Otherwise, you might come across like an ex-boyfriend stalking his former significant other.

Like a “text you get from you boyfriend: ‘You don’t love me anymore!’,” he quipped.

“We need to work on our relationship,” fellow panelist, Kurt Diver, manager of delivery consulting services at Sendgrid, suggest. “I’m more than just a credit card to you. THere’s a relationship. And you need to maintain it.”

I recommend not using incentives to motivate email subs to re-engage either.

Morgan Kazan, Director, Email Marketing,Donorschoose.org, concurred, noting that using incentives is, “Kind of rewarding bad behavior with a discount or something.”