How to Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers (And Why You Absolutely Should)

Re-engaging your inactive subscribers is all about getting them back to interacting with your emails – opening them, clicking links, basically showing they’re still interested. And trust me, it’s totally worth the effort. Not only is it way more cost-effective than constantly trying to find new customers (seriously, it can be up to 25 times cheaper to bring back an old one!), but keeping your list engaged also helps make sure the emails you do send actually land in the inbox, rather than getting flagged as spam.

So, if you’ve got subscribers who’ve gone quiet, don’t despair! There are proven ways to win them back. Stick around as we explore how to identify who’s inactive, why they might have checked out, and the best strategies you can use to rekindle that connection and turn those inactive subscribers back into active fans.

Let’s talk about your email list. You worked hard to build it. Maybe you used valuable free guides or persuasive forms to get people signed up. And for a while, subscribers came flooding in. Brilliant!

But then… well, life happens, right? For some reason, some of those subscribers just stopped engaging. They stopped opening your emails, clicking your links, or maybe even visiting your website. It feels like they’ve just… vanished. You’re not alone. This is a problem many businesses face. Email lists naturally shrink by about 22.5% every year. That’s just the way it is.

But here’s the thing: those inactive subscribers, the ones who’ve gone quiet, aren’t necessarily gone forever. There’s still hope for your relationship with them. And winning them back? It’s a critical strategy and often much easier and cheaper than finding new customers. Think of it as reconnecting with someone who already knows and had some interest in what you do.

So, instead of just writing them off, let’s talk about how to wake up those “sleeping” subscribers and turn inactivity back into opportunity.

Why Did They Go Quiet Anyway? Understanding the Silence

Before we try to win anyone back, it helps to understand why they drifted away in the first place. There isn’t one single reason, but here are some common culprits:

• Mismatched Expectations from the Start: Maybe your lead magnet, that free thing you offered, attracted people who just wanted the freebie and weren’t truly interested in your business. They signed up for a one-time offer and weren’t really engaged with the rest.
• Your Content Strategy Was a Miss: Are you sending the exact same emails to everyone?. Subscribers have different needs and interests. If your emails don’t match what they care about anymore, they’ll tune out.
• Sending Too Much (Or Not Enough): People can get overwhelmed by too many emails daily. Sending too frequently is a common reason people unsubscribe. On the flip side, if you haven’t sent an email in months, they might have simply forgotten who you are.
• Emails Not Getting Through: Sometimes, it’s technical. Emails might go to spam, addresses change, or they just don’t get delivered. Keeping highly inactive subscribers can actually hurt your deliverability because email providers see low engagement as a bad sign.
• Inconsistency or Lack of Trust: Being inconsistent in the value you provide erodes trust. Showing up in someone’s inbox is personal, and you can’t take that connection for granted.
• Changed Preferences: People’s lives change, and their interests simply might move on.
• Issues with Your Product or Service: They might have felt the cost was too high, didn’t find enough value, had a poor customer experience, or found a better alternative elsewhere.

Understanding these reasons helps you figure out what adjustments you might need to make to your overall strategy, not just the re-engagement part.

Why Bother? The Real Value of Re-engagement

So, they’ve gone quiet. Why not just delete them and focus on getting new people? Well, there are compelling reasons to make the effort:

• It’s Cheaper to Re-engage: This is a big one. It costs significantly less to re-engage an inactive customer than to acquire a brand new one. It’s said that it can cost up to 25 times more to acquire a new customer. These subscribers already had some interest in your brand.
• Hidden Revenue Potential: Inactive subscribers aren’t just dead weight; they represent a potential source of income. For every active subscriber, there could be seven or eight lapsed ones. Even winning back a small percentage, say 5%, could grow your active base by 35-40%. That’s a substantial boost without the high cost of acquisition.
• Improved Deliverability and List Health: Having a large number of inactive subscribers can negatively impact your ability to land in the inbox for everyone, including your engaged audience. ISPs look at engagement, and low engagement signals poor content or spamming. Re-engaging or removing inactive contacts improves your sending reputation and overall list health.
• More Targeted Audience: By attempting to re-engage, you either win back interested people or identify those who truly are no longer a fit. This leaves you with a more responsive and potentially more profitable list.

It’s clear: trying to win back your audience is the smart thing to do.

Planning Your Comeback Campaign: Who, What, and When?

You’re convinced, you want to try and re-engage. Great! Where do you start?

1. Define “Inactive” for Your Business: What counts as inactive for a daily news site is different from a quarterly newsletter or a restaurant’s loyalty program. Is it no opens or clicks in 3 months? 6 months? 30, 60, or 90 days?. Pick a timeframe that makes sense for your sending frequency and customer behaviour.
2. Identify Your Inactive Subscribers: Your email marketing software should help you find these folks. Look at opens, clicks, website activity, or even purchase history.
3. Segment Your Inactive List: Not all inactive subscribers are the same. Some might have only missed a few emails, while others haven’t engaged in over a year. Divide them into smaller groups based on their level of inactivity or past behaviour.

Here are some ways you can segment them:

• By Time Inactive: (e.g., 30-60 days, 6 months+, 1 year+)
• By Engagement Level: (e.g., ghosted completely, still open occasionally)
• By Purchase History: (e.g., never bought, past customer, one-time buyer)
• By Specific Action: (e.g., signed up for a freebie and left, abandoned a cart, viewed a product).
• Using RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value): This is especially useful for e-commerce.

Creating different messages for different segments is crucial. A past customer who hasn’t bought in 6 months needs a different approach than someone who downloaded a guide and disappeared.

4. Set Clear Goals: What do you want this campaign to achieve? Higher open rates? More clicks? Bringing them back to the website? Getting them to make a purchase?. Quantify your goals.

Crafting the Message: Strategies to Win Them Back

Now for the fun part: writing the emails! Your re-engagement strategy will likely involve a series of targeted emails. A typical sequence might be 3 to 5 emails.

Here are some proven strategies:

A Targeted Email Series:

Don’t rely on just one email. Send a short sequence specifically designed to grab their attention. Kate Emiley mentions a 3-part series: “We Miss You,” “Special Gift,” and “This is Bye Bye”. MailerLite suggests an automation with 1 or 2 emails, culminating in marking them as unsubscribed if they don’t engage. Retainful shows a 4-email sequence: “We Miss You!”, Improvements/New Features, Win-back offer, Last chance.

Personalization is Key (Beyond the Name):

Calling someone by their name is a start, but true personalization considers their entire history with your business. Where did they sign up? What content did they engage with? What did they buy (or look at)?. Personalized subject lines can significantly increase open rates. Tailoring offers based on past behaviour makes them feel valued. This is where your segmentation pays off.

Offer a Compelling Incentive or Special Offer:

Give them a clear reason to come back. This could be:

• A discount or coupon.
• A freebie (exclusive content, guide, template).
• Entry into a contest or giveaway.
• A tripwire offer (a low-cost product to turn a subscriber into a buyer).
• Loyalty program benefits (bonus points, tier jump). Make the offer appealing but also profitable for you.

Remind Them of Your Value & Highlight What’s New:

Why did they subscribe in the first place?. Remind them of the benefits they get. Showcase new products, features, services, or updates they’ve missed. Include links to popular past articles or content.

Ask for Feedback or Preferences:

Sending a survey, even a simple one-question survey, can help you understand why they’re disengaged and what content they do want. Allowing them to update preferences helps with better segmentation going forward.

Start an Engagement Campaign:

Sometimes the goal isn’t a sale, but just getting them to interact. Run campaigns focused on opens, clicks, responses, or traffic using promotions, contests, or user generated content requests.

Create Urgency or Scarcity:

Time-sensitive offers motivate action. Deadlines work. Use phrases like “Offer expires soon” or “Limited quantity”. This taps into FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Acknowledge Their Inactivity:

It can be effective to directly reference their period of silence. Simple subject lines or phrases like “We miss you”, “Where are you?”, or “Are we breaking up?” can grab attention. Be transparent.

Don’t Just Use Email:

Retargeting ads on social media (like Facebook Custom Audiences) can reach inactive subscribers beyond the inbox. For local businesses, even direct mail (like postcards) might work for some segments. Sunday mentions how loyalty programs integrated with payment systems can trigger reminders or offers for inactive restaurant guests.

Address Potential Objections:

If customers lapsed due to reasons like price or lack of value, address those concerns head-on in your re-engagement message.

Designing Your Emails for Impact

How your re-engagement emails look and read is just as important as the strategy behind them.

• Subject Lines Matter Most: This is your first impression. Make it attention-grabbing, intriguing, direct, or even use humour. Personalization with their name is a good move. Try variations like questions (“Still interested?”), statements (“We Miss You! Here’s 15% Off”), or calls to action (“Last Chance to Stay on Our List”).
• Keep Content Clear and Simple: Reflect your brand’s personality. Use visuals like product photos or pictures of people. Have clear calls-to-action (CTAs). Ensure the design is minimalistic and easy to scan, especially on mobile.
• Responsive Design: Emails need to look and work well on phones, tablets, and computers. Using a single-column layout and plenty of white space helps.
• Structure Your Sequence Timing: Don’t bombard them. Give them time to see and act on each email. Kate Emiley suggests waiting about three days between emails, and then waiting another seven days after the last email before deciding they haven’t re-engaged.

Tools to Help You Out

Trying to do all of this manually would be tough. Thankfully, email marketing platforms are designed to help. Tools like Drip, Mail Blaze, Retainful, Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, and Mailchimp offer features crucial for re-engagement:

• Segmentation tools to identify and group inactive subscribers.
• Automation and workflow builders to set up your re-engagement series to send automatically.
• Templates for designing your emails.
• Analytics and reporting to track your results.
• Integrations with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Facebook, etc..
• Features for adding polls, surveys, or promo codes.
• Loyalty platforms, like Sunday for restaurants, can integrate with payment systems and automate offers based on inactivity.

Putting it Together: An Example Sequence

Here’s a look at how you might structure a simple re-engagement email sequence. Remember to adjust the timing and content based on your specific business and audience.

Note: You can send up to 5 emails in a series, especially for abandoned cart sequences. The key is not to send too many emails, particularly if there’s no response.

Measuring Success and Knowing When to Stop

You’ve planned, designed, and sent your re-engagement campaign. Now what? You need to see if it’s working.

Track Key Metrics:

• Open Rates: Are they even opening the emails?
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): Are they clicking the links?
• Reactivation Percentage: How many moved from inactive to active?
• Conversion Rate: Did they make a purchase or take the desired action?
• Unsubscribe Rate: If this spikes, something might be off with your approach.
• Return on Investment (ROI): Especially important for e-commerce businesses integrated with their email platform.
• Redemption Rates: Did they use the discount or claim the freebie?.

Analyze and Optimize: Use the data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. A/B test different subject lines, offers, email content, or timing. Continuously refine your campaigns.

The Final Step: Letting Go (Sometimes)

The hard truth is, not everyone will re-engage. And that’s okay. If subscribers don’t respond to your thoughtful re-engagement efforts, it’s generally best practice to remove them from your active list.

Why? Because keeping them hurts your deliverability and skews your engagement metrics. It also saves you money if your email platform charges by subscriber count.

List Purging: Define when you’ll do this. It could be a set period after the re-engagement series is complete (e.g., 7 days after the last email if they haven’t engaged). Most email platforms have ways to mark non-responders as unsubscribed or archive them. Always provide a clear and easy unsubscribe option.

Letting go of truly apathetic subscribers makes your list healthier and more targeted.

Turning Silence into a Conversation

Seeing subscribers go quiet can feel discouraging, but it’s a natural part of running an email list. Instead of ignoring it, see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to refine your strategy, reconnect with people who once showed interest, and build a stronger, more engaged audience.

By clearly defining inactivity, segmenting your list, crafting personalized messages with compelling offers, and using the right tools, you can bring a significant portion of those dormant subscribers back into the fold.

Remember to measure your results, learn from what works (and what doesn’t), and don’t be afraid to prune your list when necessary.

Re-engagement isn’t just about boosting numbers; it’s about rebuilding connections. It’s about reminding them why they liked you in the first place and showing them the value you continue to offer. So, go on, fire up those campaigns and start winning back your audience!

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean to re-engage email subscribers?

Re-engaging your email subscribers means bringing them back from an inactive status to an engaged one, where they are opening and interacting with your emails and brand again. It’s about reigniting interest and prompting action from subscribers who have stopped interacting with your emails.

Why is it important to re-engage inactive email subscribers?

Re-engaging inactive subscribers is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it’s significantly more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. It can cost anywhere from 5 times to up to 25 times more to gain a new customer than to retain or re-engage an existing one. Winning back even a small percentage of lapsed subscribers can substantially grow your list or base. Secondly, having many inactive subscribers can negatively impact your email deliverability and sender reputation. Email service providers (ISPs) and platforms like Gmail look at how subscribers engage with your emails; low engagement signals that your content might not be valuable, which can cause your emails to be filtered into spam folders, preventing even your active subscribers from seeing them. Maintaining a healthy, engaged list helps ensure your emails land in the inbox. Re-engaging subscribers also helps make the most of the list you’ve already worked hard to build.

How do you identify inactive subscribers?

Identifying inactive subscribers requires defining what “inactive” means for your specific business, as this can vary depending on how often you send emails and your typical customer behavior. A common benchmark is subscribers who haven’t opened an email in the last three months or six months. However, you might consider inactivity based on missing a certain number of recent emails if you send more frequently. Most email marketing tools and service providers, like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp, allow you to segment your list based on engagement levels or activity duration to identify these subscribers. For subscription businesses, inactive subscribers might be defined as those with no active subscriptions, having either canceled or let it lapse.

Why do subscribers go inactive?

Subscribers can go inactive for various reasons, and often it’s not just one factor. Some common culprits include:

• Issues with the email capture process: You might not have attracted targeted, high-quality leads, or the lead magnet wasn’t aligned with your business, attracting people only interested in the freebie.
• Your email content strategy is lacking: You might not be segmenting your audience or tailoring content to their specific needs and interests. Sending the same content to everyone can lead to disengagement.
• Sending too many emails: High frequency can overwhelm subscribers.
• Emails aren’t getting delivered: Technical issues can cause emails to go to spam or not be delivered at all.
• Lack of authenticity or consistency: Inconsistency in showing up or adding value erodes trust.
• Inbox Overload: People receive many emails daily, making it hard to stand out.
• Content Relevance: If your emails no longer match their interests, they disengage.
• Changed Preferences: Sometimes interests simply change over time.
• Price Sensitivity or Lack of Perceived Value: This is particularly true for subscriptions.
• Poor Customer Experience: Difficult cancellations or poor support can drive people away.
• Unmet Expectations or Better Alternatives: The product or service didn’t deliver as promised, or competitors offer something better.

How can you re-engage inactive subscribers?

Re-engaging requires a thoughtful approach, often involving a series of steps. Key strategies include:

• Identify and segment inactive subscribers: Define inactivity and divide your list into smaller groups based on factors like duration of inactivity, past behavior, or interests to tailor your approach.
• Understand why they disengaged: While not always easy, try to infer reasons based on their past behavior or ask them directly.
• Offer incentives or special offers: Provide a discount, coupon, free resource, exclusive content, or entry into a competition to give them a reason to return.
• Personalize communication: Go beyond just using their name; tailor content based on their history, interests, or segment. This makes them feel valued and understood.
• Remind them of the value: Highlight what they are missing out on and the benefits of being a subscriber.
• Highlight new features or content: Show them what’s new since they last engaged.
• Ask for preferences: Give them an opportunity to update their subscription preferences or interests. A one-question survey can be effective.
• Use a targeted email series: Send a sequence of emails specifically designed to win them back over a period.
• Utilize retargeting campaigns: Reach inactive subscribers with ads on platforms like Facebook or through website retargeting.
• Host re-engagement events: Consider online events like webinars, Q&As, or workshops to create buzz and encourage interaction.
• Start an engagement campaign: Focus on driving specific interactions like email opens, responses, or website traffic.
• Offer a tripwire: For segments closer to purchasing, a low-ticket offer can turn them into buyers.

How many emails should be in a re-engagement campaign series?

A typical re-engagement campaign series often consists of 3 to 5 emails. One common approach is a 3-part series:

• Email 1: A “We Miss You” or reminder email acknowledging their inactivity.
• Email 2: Offering a special gift, incentive, or highlighting new value.
• Email 3: A “last chance” email before they might be removed from the list.
  
  You can try sequences with 4 or 5 emails, particularly for abandoned cart scenarios. It’s recommended not to flood them with too many emails if they aren’t opening them, as this can be considered spam.

When should you send re-engagement campaigns?

The ideal timing depends on your definition of inactivity and the specific customer behavior. A general guideline is to send re-engagement emails 3 to 6 months after a subscriber becomes inactive. The goal is to reach them before they become completely disengaged. For specific behaviors like abandoned carts or browse abandonment, re-engagement emails are sent much sooner – typically within hours or a few days. For a post-purchase but no repeat purchase scenario, you might send a re-engagement email 30-60 days later.

How do you measure the success of re-engagement efforts?

To measure the success of your re-engagement campaigns, you should track key email marketing metrics for the segment of inactive subscribers you are targeting. Important metrics include:

• Open Rates: Are people even seeing your re-engagement emails?
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): Are they interacting with the content or calls-to-action within the emails?
• Reactivation Percentage or Conversion Rate: How many inactive subscribers become active again (e.g., opening future emails, clicking links, making a purchase)?
• Unsubscribe Rate: If this is high during the campaign, your approach might be too aggressive.
• Return on Investment (ROI): If you’ve integrated your email marketing with your sales data, you can see the revenue generated from reactivated customers.
• Track Redemption Rates: If you offered incentives, see how many were used.
• Monitor Repeat Visits: See if reactivated customers continue to engage after the initial campaign. Analyze this data to understand what works and optimize your strategies over time.

What is the difference between re-engagement and retargeting?

Re-engagement typically focuses on email outreach to inactive subscribers on your email list. You use email campaigns to try and win back their interest. Retargeting, on the other hand, uses ads to bring back users who have previously interacted with your website or brand, often on platforms like social media. While different, they can be used together as part of a broader strategy to reconnect with inactive contacts across multiple channels.

What should you do if re-engagement efforts fail?

It’s important to accept that not all inactive subscribers will re-engage. If your re-engagement efforts, such as sending a targeted series of emails, are unsuccessful after a defined period, it’s generally considered best practice to remove these subscribers from your email list. While this reduces your list size, it helps improve your overall engagement rates and deliverability. Keeping truly apathetic subscribers who don’t engage can damage your sender reputation. Removing them ensures you are primarily reaching people who are genuinely interested in your brand. You should also provide an easy way for subscribers to unsubscribe themselves if they prefer.