One of our favorite email service providers, MailChimp recently put out a post on the value of inactive email subscribers —you know, the people you continue to send emails to that never seem to open or click them?
MailChimp sends a LOT of email (four years ago they reported sending over 100M emails per day), which means they’re in a unique position to shed light on perpetually niggling questions about email best practices and ROI.
After reviewing 6.6 billion sends from e-commerce businesses, Mailchimp found that inactive subscribers (defined as those who received emails from a company, but did not open them) were worth 32% of active subscribers. Said differently:
Inactive subscriber purchases were equivalent to one third of the revenue generated by active subscribers.
What about non-subscribed customers (i.e., people who buy things from your business but don’t subscribe to your emails) you may ask?
Turns out both active and inactive email subscribers outperform non-subscribed customers in every way.
Subscribers (be they active or inactive) ordered 25% more frequently, and when they did, they spent 6% more than non-subscribers.
They’re also more likely to return; inactive subscribers were 26% more likely to make a follow-on purchase than non-subscribers.
You may not be running an e-commerce business (we don’t), however these findings are relevant to all types of email campaigns, be they to external or internal subscribers, for B2B or B2C businesses; it’s about the likelihood of your inactive subscribers taking action.
In an e-commerce context that may be a purchase, in a B2B context that may be signing up for a webinar or downloading a piece of conversion content.
Here’s how to address your inactive email subscribers:
Start by identifying your inactive subscribers. Again, these are your email subscribers who don’t open your emails.
Don’t prune them from your list! This is coming straight from the mouth of a large scale email service provider. Yes, this is the opposite of what marketers have been telling each other for years, however the MailChimp data backs it up: an inactive subscriber is a better customer than a non-subscriber.
Continue to send engaging content to your inactive users. Probably a good idea to address them a bit differently than your active subscribers. Regardless, the point is to continue to send them emails.
Encourage everyone to join your list. The overarching point is that having someone as a subscriber—be they active or inactive—is far more valuable than not having them as one. Continuously building your email lists should be a top priority.
