Major mailbox providers such as Gmail and Outlook commonly use engagement metrics to decide whether or not a particular sender should be considered as a spammer.

Furthermore, if a former user hasn’t logged into their mailbox for an extended period of time then providers sometimes turn them into ‘spam traps’.

If marketers consistently send messages to spam traps then it’s a sign they aren’t cleaning their email list, which is another warning signal that they might be a spammer.

In order to avoid being incorrectly labelled as an evil spammer, marketers should consider using win-back email campaigns on lapsed subscribers before ultimately scratching them from their database for good.

But do people actually engage with these kind of emails? Read on to find out, or for more information on this topic download the Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census 2014.

Win-back email success

Data taken from the 33 retailers that conducted win-back campaigns shows that the average read rate was just 12%.

This obviously isn’t hugely encouraging, though it is still a relatively good response if you take into account the fact that the recipients had all been identified as inactive customers.

Read rates from win-back campaigns

Also, there appears to be a positive knock-on effect in that 45% of recipients who received win-back emails then read subsequent marketing email from that brand, even though only a quarter of them (24%) engaged with the initial win-back message.

But just to confuse matters further, it turns out that the average length of time between when people received a win-back email and when they read a subsequent message was 57 days.

As such it’s difficult to draw any hard conclusions as to whether the win-back email directly influenced the future engagement.

In conclusion…

Ultimately it seems that brands shouldn’t immediately remove people from their email list if they fail to respond to a win-back campaign.

Recipients were still re-engaging with the retailers’ marketing messages up to 300 days after they received the initial win-back email, so brands shouldn’t be too quick to slash inactive subscribers from their lists.

Instead a wiser approach would be to send a series of short, simple win-back emails before culling inactive recipients.

Return Path also came up with several useful tips to help optimise  campaigns:

  • To encourage engagement use a shorter template and subject lines, such as “We miss you,” or “Was it something we said?” 
    Reactivation emails with the words “miss you” in their subject lines achieved a 13% read rate, and messages with the words “come back” in their subject lines achieved a 12.7% read rate.
  • Focus on one clear call-to-action rather than muddling the message with different offers.
  • If providing an incentive, test different offers. According to Return Path’s research, money off incentives performed better than a percentage off.

Click here to download the full report from Return Path