• by Jess Nelson , November 4, 2016

Inactive subscribers account for as much as 50% of a marketer’s email list, according to a recent report from Experian Marketing Services, a signal of worrying issues-to-come for email marketers.

Inactive subscribers can negatively impact a campaign, not just in brand awareness, but also in email deliverability. So do you simply delete these subscribers for a healthier email list? 

Spencer Kollas, vice president of global deliverability at Experian Marketing Services, says brands should not ignore these inactive customers but instead offer them incentives to become re-engaged. He says that reactivation campaigns represent a higher ROI opportunity with notably less ad spend when compared to customer acquisition campaigns.

Experian recently launched an e-book that examines best practices for engaging with inactive subscribers.

“I think a reactivation campaign is honestly one of the most important types of campaigns we can use in digital marketing,” says Kollas. “You’re not trying to win a new customer, you’re trying to win back an old customer. There’s so much value if you can just hit that customer with the right type of message.”

Kollas says that email is really not intended as an acquisition channel, and serves much better as a channel for ongoing customer communication and retention.

He describes a reactivation campaign as a mixture between acquisition and retention campaigns.

“It truly is a cross between reactivation and acquisition,” he says. “It’s almost like a re-acquisition, because you’ve already gotten them before.”

Kollas emphasizes data as the outlet for marketers seeking to reactivate disengaged subscribers. 

“It’s a matter of figuring out what’s going to be relevant to your customers,” says Kollas. “You’re not going to have an engaged tax customer 11 months of the year, let alone in April. Understand your customer and what they’re looking for.”

Experian offers an Email Insights program of an aggregate of third-party and first-party data from its customers. Kollas describes it as a cooperative database, which today has more than 100 brands participating and more than 550 million email addresses. 

Kollas says this type of information especially valuable for re-engagement campaigns.

For example, a marketer may only have a customer’s email address and no additional information -- making it difficult to deliver truly personalized communication. Through Experian’s cooperative database, however, that same marketer might discover that their subscriber lives in Atlanta, GA and likes to buy tennis shoes.

“A lot of marketing comes down to ---  especially in digital –hyper-focused personalization,” says Kollas. “By opening up data consortiums across the board, marketers can use more data to create better personalized messages.”

Kollas also recommends that brands A/B test their email subject lines because “that’s the first thing that will catch their attention.” In addition, he recommends that marketers confirm opt-ins and offer preference centers for subscriber to dictate how they would like to be marketed to.

“People want to feel like they have a choice and that they’ve opted in,” says Kollas.

“Everyone owns their email. A preference center allows me to feel in control and that the company cares about me.”