Email subscribers stopped opening. Now what?

It happens. You subscribe to an email list because something interests you, or you want a free download. For the first few emails, you’re pretty interested.

But, over time, the novelty wears off. You pay attention less. You might filter the messages to save them for later, but…

There you are. On the list. But, not paying any attention.

Now, let’s flip this scenario over. You’re now in the position of being the person who owns the email list. You’re the one doing the writing. And you have subscribers who are still subscribed, but they’re not opening your emails.

What do you do?

First off, let’s recognize that there’s things you should be doing with your email subscribers to keep from getting to this point. As I said in my post about daily emails, you really can’t email your subscribers too often. You can only be too boring. The R-P-F email formula (defined in that post) is important and will help keep people engaged, for sure.

But, once they’ve become unengaged, you want to do two things:

1. Give them every opportunity in the world to RE-engage and entice them to do so.

2. If they don’t re-engage, remove them from your list.

Now, not gonna BS ya on this…

It sucks. It is REALLY hard sometimes to delete subscribers who are technically still subscribed. But, as I said several times now, it is their ATTENTION which really matters. And they’re simply not paying attention.

But, before you ever think about deleting them, you want to run what is called a reengagement campaign.

This campaign is pre-written and sent out as an autoresponder sequence. It should probably be 10-14 emails long and sent out over the course of 2-3 weeks.

The whole point of this email campaign is to get them to click on something. ANYTHING. Really doesn’t matter. You’re just trying to get them to engage by clicking on a link.

What can you send them? Well anything that would entice the click. Could be:

• An enticing free download

• A free gift (just for clicking and reengaging)

• A survey

If the person clicks on a link any time during this campaign, they are automatically REMOVED from the campaign and things go back to normal.

And, if they get all the way though those 10-14 emails and don’t click on anything, they’re clearly not paying attention or simply couldn’t care less. Time to delete ’em.

Most any email marketing company worth your time has a way to do this. With a company like Mailchimp or Aweber, you just create a segment and send your emails to the segment. Here’s an Aweber post on how to do it. The only “catch” with it is that you can’t set it and forget it. You’ll need to broadcast those emails to them manually.

With a more automated system like Drip (who I really, REALLY like), all this stuff is built right in. They have a built in pruning screen that makes all this a matter of a few clicks.

BTW, inside the current version of the Email Followup Engine course inside The Lab, I have a full swipe file of that 10 email campaign for re-engagement. It is modeled right after my own sequence, so you can make some edits and use the sequence for yourself.

As I said earlier, I am updating this whole course right now. But, this re-engagement campaign will remain a part of it. I’ll also be providing other sample email sequences as well.

See ya tomorrow!

– David