A client asked me about inactive subscribers and responses to newsletters – how much does this influence email deliverability?
Here’s my response:
“I was curious about the request for the inactive list last week, and now I understand the reason 🙂
Several studies indicate that engagement segmentation — treating differently those who engage more and those who don’t — brings good results and is now considered an established best practice.
Continuing to send messages to those who do not open them harms deliverability. There is a good chance these messages are going to the person’s spam folder. If we keep sending them, this reinforces to the email providers that we have spammer behavior.
(Just look at your SPAM folder, and you’ll find messages from legitimate senders that you don’t know how they ended up there. Probably because you haven’t engaged with them for some time, so Google started directing them to SPAM.)
A good practice is segmenting the list into two groups: the most engaged and the least engaged. And send the newsletter separately to the two groups: first to the engaged and sometime later to the unengaged (1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, etc. — the longest time possible.)
The natural engagement with the first group sends signals that email providers monitor (opens, clicks, scrolling, reading time, etc.). When they realize the message engages, they will favor its deliverability to the second group.
Over a few months, this improves the overall deliverability of the email marketing program.
In addition, it is good to periodically conduct re-engagement (or win-back) campaigns to reactivate inactive (unengaged) subscribers.
Eventually, we remove from the list those who do not engage.
Regarding responses, they are one of the most vital signals of engagement.
In the welcome message, an effective tactic is to ask what the person’s main question or curiosity is about the newsletter’s topic. In addition to improving the deliverability of future messages for those who respond, it will bring good insights for the business.
Or ask a straightforward question that is very easy to answer (in this case, the benefit is only for deliverability.) For example: “How did you hear about our newsletter?”
In regular newsletters, you can simply ask what the person thought about the content, if they have any comments to share, etc. The problem is that it will generate work to handle the responses (we need to read and manage all responses as necessary). Depending on the volume, it may be impractical to use this tactic in all messages.
I follow Chad White’s precepts (Email Marketing Rules) and will be happy to send more details and suggestions for improving the newsletter management 🙂
Kind regards,
Fabrício”
