Submitted by: denise cox on Tue, 29/05/2007 - 14:07

I’ve been reading a lot lately about reactivation – the process of dealing with inactive subscribers on a mailing list. Often mentioned is the fact that subscribers become less active over the life of their subscription.

I decided to trend this statistic on my own newsletter, the business of email. I’ve been publishing this opt-in, monthly newsletter since 1997. It was plain text before going full colour in 2002. This means I can only track identified opens from 2002 – but should still give me insight.

The results?

It certainly shows less identified activity amongst early subscribers.

What to do next? I think I need to take into account the fact that image-blocking software could be blocking identification of an open – and this newsletter was designed to be scanned, not clicked. So, are these people all really inactive? I also need to take into account that subscribers generally don’t open every single issue. In B2B marketing anyway, I’ve found that the average reader opens one in every three issues of a monthly publication.

In my case, I’m not going to rush out and delete the inactive subscribers. I’ll probably have to decide where I draw the line of “inactive”. After six months? One year? I’ll then segment out those subscribers and send the newsletter with a different subject line. After a couple of issues of this process, I’ll take any inactives from those mailings and invite them to re-subscribe to the newsletter. The remaining inactives from that task will be deleted.

It’s a complex topic, I think every marketer will have to review their own circumstances before making decisions.

I’d like to get others thoughts, opinions or statistics on this topic …

2 Responses to Do subscribers become less active over time?

Karlin Lillington says: June 25, 2007 at 10:07 pm

This is an interesting question. I think a lot of people that don’t click through aren’t totally inactive, just not active enough to click for more info. I subscribe to a lot of tech newsletters for example, and on many of them I rarely ever click through to the website. But I like skimming the headlines as a sort of quickie topic briefing. I might go back and pursue those stories at a later point. Months can pass and then I might rediscover a site again because of a regular newsletter I just hadn’t clicked through on for some time.

Of course that isn’t ideal when I know the senders of the newsletters would rather have me click through to their own content! Butalternatively, I do know I wouldn’t want to find myself deleted from their mailing lists, all the same.

I suspect a lot of people are like me and remain semi-active in this way.

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denise cox says: June 26, 2007 at 8:58 am

very good point karlin. there are certainly a lot of informational newsletters out there that serve the purpose of providing digestible news items … so you don’t have to click. and that point needs to be taken into consideration when reviewing ‘inactives’.

probably the question of inactivity comes up because of image blocking which prevents *any* indication of activity today …. and the other consideration is if the inactives are not engaging even once in an article or ad over the course of a year – perhaps the content may need to be reviewed? so rather then deleting them it’s reviewing your content.

denise

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