Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Hey there, we haven’t heard from you in a while.

Do you not want to receive our messages anymore?

Do we have your contact information right?

These three prompts all have two things in common. They are found in nearly every email re-engagement series AND they all advertise the lack of engagement a supporter has with your organization.

Let’s back up. We all know it’s best practice to remove inactive email subscribers from your list regularly.

Organizations have different definitions of inactivity, but most consider an email inactive when it has not engaged with a message in three, six, or 12 months. Before a subscriber is removed from the list, most organizations try to win back their attention through a re-engagement series — which likely utilizes some of the prompts above.

Flipping the script

But are these truly the right questions to ask? Put yourself in your supporters’ shoes and consider their experience. Learning they haven’t engaged with your messages in many months only highlights that they have been just fine without you. Inquiring if you have their contact information right showcases your lack of connection. Rather than putting a subscriber’s disinterest on display, we should be showing supporters why they subscribed in the first place.

Consider the difference between these two subject lines:

• We haven’t heard from you in a while, do you still love dogs?
• This is the best dog rescue story of 2024, and we know you’ll love it!

It is not our subscriber’s responsibility to engage with us. It is our responsibility to engage with them.

This doesn’t mean we should continue to send messages to people who are unengaged, it means we need to ask better questions and provide better content to keep them interested — and it also means that sometimes we need to give our readers a break.

Take a break before breaking up

Rather than immediately marking a subscriber as inactive if they don’t respond to your re-engagement series, try putting them in a “recently lapsed” group that receives a different communication cadence than your normal audience. We suggest sending this group one email per month with your absolute best, most engaging content.

We’ve seen that giving folks breathing room can help them naturally reactivate. It’s a surprisingly simple tactic, but it can be incredibly effective. After a pause in your messages, subscribers who used to automatically ignore you in their inbox notice you again.

After six months of receiving this modified communication schedule a subscriber still hasn’t shown any interest, then you can feel confident in saying goodbye.

Removing subscribers from your list is tough for any email marketer or fundraiser. And while sometimes splitting up is the right call, we have an opportunity to retain subscribers through compelling content and personalized communication experiences. Every email on your list signed up for a reason (and it wasn’t to be reminded when they don’t click on an email for three months). It’s our job to connect with supporters – not the other way around.