Active versus Inactive Users: Who's On Your Email List?

A new client recently came to me concerned about the open rates for his email campaigns, which were running about 11%. When I asked whether he was aware of the proportion of active versus inactive users on his email list, he had no idea. So we determined the number of inactive users (people who hadn’t opened his company’s emails for 6 months or more), took a look at the open rates without the inactive users and found that that the rates were actually about 37%. My advice: It was time to try to re-engage his audience and/or weed out the inactive users from the list.

Do you know how many inactive users are on your email list? This is an important metric to be aware of for two major reasons:

• It’s a good gauge as to whether your message and content are maintaining the interest of your audience.
• A high number of inactive users can hurt your email deliverability. Repeatedly sending to people who don’t open your emails can result in a lower email reputation score from the ISPs and, subsequently, decrease inbox delivery rates.

I’ve provided below an example of a graphical view of an active user analysis.  Note that there are 5,000 people on this fictitious list who have not opened an email in 6 months.  Those are the inactive users.

Because active versus inactive users plays such an important role in the success of email marketing, we’ve decided to go deeper into how to prevent having a list with a high number of inactive users, as well as ways to re-engage your target audience, in our next issue of NewsLever (FulcrumTech’s monthly newsletter). So watch for it in early June! In the meantime, be sure to contact me, or add a comment to this post to learn more about determining your email list’s active users and how FulcrumTech can use this information to help improve your online marketing results.