All companies and organizations at some point in their email marketing efforts will develop quite a few inactive or unresponsive email lists. Although your main concern may not be email database housekeeping, to try to get more from your email marketing you need to honestly look at just how much of your subscriber database is either inactive or unresponsive. Unresponsive and inactive email lists and databases can actually become quite a serious issue, particularly since they will cost you money and can have a serious effect on the measurability and therefore viability of your marketing campaigns.
Should you Resurrect an Inactive Email Database?
Although inactive subscribers on an email database do have a cost and can affect the deliverability of your email marketing campaigns in a number of ways, just removing them from your database isn’t necessarily the best approach to take. There could be all sorts of reasons as to why a recipient isn’t responding to your campaign, even one on a business email list, so you should at least give some effort to trying to restore the lost relationship. You can do this with reactivation campaigns that will re-introduce the inactive individuals on your email lists to your brand and company. If this campaign fails to generate a response then bring best practice into play and remove the addresses from your email database before they cause you long term deliverability problems. Obviously if you are getting return reports that email addresses no longer exist these addresses should be instantly removed from your database.
How to Resurrect a Business Email List or Consumer List:
Surpassingly despite the two different email database types requiring their own dedicated campaigns you can try to resurrect a business or consumer email list in a similar way. Yes, the actual content contained in the email should be tailored more towards the individual types of customer, but if you have inactive business and consumer emails on your databases the first thing you need to do is open up a dialogue to build both trust and ask for a response.
One of the simplest ways to resurrect email lists or a business email list is to send out emails that are transparent and honest. Say that you miss the valuable custom that your inactive subscribers have given you in the past and ask them why they haven’t responded. Give an easy unsubscribe option in such an email so that if they do no longer want to hear from your company they can instantly remove themselves from your email lists. Remember that incentives can encourage engagement with your company too, so use one-off or limited time offers to try to generate a response. Prevention really is the best method when it comes to dealing with an inactive email database or business email list, so you should aim to send out a survey-based email at least once a year to your email lists asking your subscribers for their opinions on both your company and its communication.
