Update: Lots of our users have found the reactivation process helpful, and we’ve updated this post so the process is clearer. Updates to the original post appear in bold.
Note: The reactivation process only works for users who have a history of sending with MailChimp. If you import a list and go through this process before sending with MailChimp, chances are that we’ll unsubscribe more of your list than you’d like. That’s because there’s a rating system in the app that tracks subscriber activity and engagement, and the engagement data isn’t applied until you’ve sent a few campaigns to your list. The more history you have with sending through MailChimp, the more accurate our engagement data will be.
Last week, Ben blogged about how MailChimp allows you to segment your mailing list by activity. He gave several good examples of how you can use the tool effectively, but I’d like to show you how to use it to reactivate inactive subscribers and remove subscribers who don’t want to be on your list.
If you’ve ever received a subscription to a magazine, you know that as you approach the end of your subscription, you start receiving letters in the mail about renewing your subscription. And it’s never just one: You get a series of letters, all designed to move you to action. It may seem like overkill, but there’s good research showing that a renewal series is more effective at retaining subscribers than a single renewal notice. Renewals can get lost, thrown away, or forgotten in a pile of mail. Sending a series of renewals increases the likelihood that a subscriber will renew if he desires, or that he’ll make an active decision not to renew.
Keeping someone on your email list may not mean that you’ll see additional subscription or advertising revenue. However, if the overall engagement of your list affects its deliverability, it makes sense to confirm that inactive subscribers want to be on your list, and to remove subscribers that have lost interest. Plus, if you have a large number of inactive subscribers on your list, you may be spending more money on your campaigns than is necessary. The magazine-renewal principle applies to email lists, too: Email can easily get lost in a cluttered inbox, and sending a series of reactivation notices ensures that the subscriber is aware that his subscription is expiring.
To set up a reactivation campaign in MailChimp, create a new campaign. When you get to the list screen, segment your list like this:
Make sure both conditions apply by selecting “match ALL of the following”. We recommend that you target subscribers who have been inactive for at least six months. To do that, set the two conditions like I’ve done above. Member ratings of 1 and 2 respectively represent subscribers who have soft bounced and subscribers who have never opened or clicked email you’ve sent them.
When you’ve successfully segmented your list, you’re ready to begin writing the text of your reactivation campaign. For the second and third emails in the series, you can segment your list the same way. Subscribers that have reactivated won’t match the conditions of the segment, so you don’t need to worry about accidentally sending them subsequent renewal notices.
What does a reactivation series actually look like? I’ve created a very generic series below. You’re welcome to copy or revise this text for your own reactivation campaigns.
EMAIL #1
Subject: Do You Want to Renew Your Subscription?
*|FNAME| *,
You signed up to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *. Would you like to renew your subscription?
Please take a moment to indicate your preference below:
<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>
<a href=”*|UNSUB| *”>NO, I no longer wish to receive email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>
Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *
EMAIL #2
Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Expires Soon
*|FNAME| *,
We haven’t heard from you about your subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. If you want to be removed from our mailing list, you don’t need to do anything further. If you’d like to continue receiving news and information, please reply by clicking below:
<a href=”link to Thank You page”>YES, I’d like to continue receiving email from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>
Thanks,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *
EMAIL #3
Subject: Your Subscription to *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s Newsletter Has Expired
*|FNAME| *,
Thanks for your interest in receiving *|LIST:COMPANY| *’s newsletter. Your subscription has expired and you have been removed from our mailing list.
If you’d like to renew your subscription now or in the future, click the link below:
<a href=”link to Sign Up page”>YES, I’d like to receive news and information from *|LIST:COMPANY| *.</a>
Sincerely,
*|LIST:COMPANY| *
Wrapping Up
As you can see, the first notice just asks if the subscriber would like to continue receiving email. The second notice acknowledges the first and only provides a positive action; the subscriber will be unsubscribed if no action is taken. The third email confirms that no action has been taken and the subscriber will be unsubscribed, while providing one final opportunity to reactivate.
Immediately after you send Email #3, export the 2-star segment and use our bulk unsubscribe tool to unsubscribe everyone that was sent Email #3. This will clear all the inactive addresses from your list. Anyone who receives Email #3 and wants to stay subscribed will have a final opportunity to re-subscribe by clicking the subscribe link in Email #3.
Another option would be to export the 2-star segment between sending Email #2 and Email #3, and to create a temporary list you can use to send Email #3. With this option, you can go ahead and bulk unsubscribe the remaining 2-star addresses from your primary list before sending Email #3. Delete the temporary list after you send email #3 and you’re all done!
Concerning the YES and NO options within the emails: The YES option for Emails #1-2 can link to any page on your site, because simply clicking on the link will increase the subscriber’s rating to 3 stars and remove him from the inactive segment. Ideally, you should link to a dedicated page that thanks your subscribers for renewing. Note that you can’t link to MailChimp’s “thank you” page; the link should go to a page on your own site. Also, it can take up to 24 hours for member ratings to change after subscribers click the link in your reactivation email. The YES option for Email #3 should go to your MailChimp sign up form, which will provide your readers an opportunity to be added back to your list. The NO option should contain your unsubscribe link, which you can copy above or from any previous campaign you sent.
Unsubscribe
Regardless of the frequency of your normal campaigns, we recommend sending the reactivation series over three weeks, with one email per week. That way, you won’t overwhelm your subscribers with email, but the series will be frequent enough that you’ll keep the reactivation request fresh on their minds.
You’ll want to be sure you email compliance@mailchimp.com so they have a heads up that you’re sending a reactivation email. In the event that your campaign generates high unsubscribe rates, prior notification will help them be aware of what you’re doing and can help you avoid the account becoming temporarily disabled. When you’ve completed the series and allowed a week for subscribers to reply to the final email, go into your MailChimp list and remove the subscribers that still fit the inactive segment.
this is so useful! I was all ready to send a letter like this, but I just didn’t know how to write it! thank you so much for this.
What a great idea! I appreciate the “secret” behind the yes/no links. Would never have thought of that.
This is really helpful. I find myself stumbling over how to frame the words. Thanks!
I’ve been wondering how to slim my list to active, interested members – for economy of energy and money.
This covers everything and even gives me a headstart with the message writing!
A wonderful gift, thank you!
Great information. That last paragraph is a loaded issue. How do we easily remove potentially thousands of inactive users?
Good question!
1. Go to the Lists screen from the MailChimp dashboard.
2. Open the appropriate list.
3. Choose “view all members”.
4. Click “segment” and enter the same conditions as you used in your reactivation campaign.
5. Export the segment to spreadsheet.
6. Click the “Remove People” button at top of page where you segmented your list.
7. Copy and paste the list of addresses you want to remove from the spreadsheet into the removal field and click “unsubscribe”.
Ah, a banana for you. By the way, where does the picture come from on the left. I’d like to make it me.
The picture shows up if you setup a gravatar – http://en.gravatar.com/
Thanks for the clear step by step instructions. But what happens if, now that WE have unsubscribed a person, and they contact us shortly after we have removed them, asking us to again receive the newsletter again – either at a function, on our website sign up or by phone. We don’t use the MC sign up form on our site but upload an updated list from Filemaker before each campaign. This old/new subscriber now comes up as unsubscribed and cannot be added back in… There in lies the problem. There really needs to be a ‘Removed’ button, and a ‘Do not send/Unsubscribed’ button. The first, is simply removed from the list (A tick box next to each person’s email would be useful), The Do not send is blocked from sending to.
Also note that this technique will likely result in an automatic compliance email from Mailchimp as it could have a high unsubscribe rate (which is expected). No big deal, but be ready to let them know you got things under control.
It could possibly result in a higher complaint count, but not sure yet, we just did this for the first time a few hours ago.
Not so smooth MailChimp. I was really excited about this post and sent my first “Do You Want to Renew Your Subscription” email yesterday. Proceeded to get a MailChimp Compliance email from you this morning saying that people were unsubscribing from my list at an unacceptable rate. Maybe you want to not send that email to anyone trying to improve their list quality in the future.
Ruh-roh! Did our automated abuse system send a heads-up, or did it shut you down? The heads-up emails are meant to let you know we’re seeing some troubling stuff going on with your list. And an out-of-the-ordinary unsub rate is normally a bad thing. In your case, you were just trying to do good, and got a warning. Sorry. Maybe we’ll edit the wording on that alert. The warnings are only there so that if things get *really* bad, and we have to shut you down, you’re not surprised about why. If you actually got suspended, our abuse desk team can quickly review the account and un-suspend.
Got a clearly automated message that says “A MailChimp campaign you recently sent got so many unsubscribe
requests that we had to suspend your account.”
Then, per instructions in email, had to reply back with an email answering your little questions about my list.
However I can still access the account. So not really sure what the deal is there.
Needless to say, unpleasant way to start the morning. Hoping that tweaking that automated message can prevent others from being likewise frustrated.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for posting. I’d still encourage users to keep cleaning their inactives as described in this post, even though the system will send a warning. An email slap-of-the-wrist is better than the deliverability issues that result from repeatedly sending to bad addresses. Meantime, we’ll tweak our abuse system.
Thanks for the article. Two issues however:
1) When people click on the “thanks” link (making them an active person now), they are still at 2 stars. I checked their profile after clicking thanks.
2) The article says to link to the thanks page. This should have been clarified to say that you can’t actually link to the thanks page created by mailchimp. Rather, the user must create their own thanks page and then link to it in the email.
Hi John,
It can take up to 24 hours for the member rating to change after subscribers click on the link in the reactivation email. Give it some time and let us know if you don’t see anything happen. And you’re right about the thanks page. I’ve edited the article to clarify both your points. Thanks for the feedback.
Mark, just to confirm this approach only works if you enable the Tracking option to track clicks correct?
Thanks.
You’re right, Eric. Great point.
I just want t make sure I’m ticking all the boxes, can you clarify how I enable the tracking option. For plain text as well please?
thanks
Check out the screenshot here:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-do-i-track-clicks-and-opens
Those are the checkboxes to track clicks (including within plain-text messages).
Mark, Ben,
I guess we need to activate plain text tracking for this campaign? Otherwise the campaign won’t have any effect on members that click the links in the plain text e-mail version?
Thanks.
Most people when running an email marketing campaign eventually end up with some inactive subscribers and I think this blog/article has helpful information on how to reconnect with your inactive subscribers. The other point made in the blog that you do not here as much about in the email marketing world is removing people from your list. This is also a good piece of advice to take. People do not want to be bothered and keeping them on your list will most likely not help your cause but have a negative effect.
From what I can tell this could be set as an auto-responder.
Create a segment which is “less than 3 stars”
Using this segment create an auto-responder which
sends [180] [days] [after] [signup]
Set the time period which suits your list.
You could then continue with email #2 and #3 at say in this example 187 days after then 194 days after
You could then simply continually remove users with less than 3 stars older than 195 days. Probably even do that via the API thereby completely automating the process.
Now that’s an interesting approach. Love it when our customers think of stuff I’d never think of in a million years. thanks!
Thank you.
I have a different idea
Is the member rating available as a merge tag?
What I am thinking of doing is adding a paragraph to each campaign along the lines of
“We hope you enjoy the [company] newsletter. To ensure you continue to receive a copy please click here to confirm your interest.”
- Links to a Thank You page.
This will be displayed to users with a member rating of <3.
Currently this only seems possible by doing two separate segmented campaigns. But if the member rating was a merge tag then it would be much simpler.
Andy, this is a great idea using the merge tags. Were you able to get this to work? I have seen this method used on ConstantContact (Without knowing it’s purpose).
I didn’t see a merge field that enables you to check member rating in order to do an “IF member rating < 3 stars" then display this message.
I asked Mailchimp and at present there is no merge tag available. I have instead created segmented campaigns.
Using an auto-responder would be ideal I think. Is there a way to completely automate this process? Say…
180 days after subscribe, if Member Rating is 2 or less then send out email 1, email 2, automatically unsubscribe them, then send out email 3?
Having to manually remove members from low rating segmented lists seems pretty labor intensive. Comments?
It is not that intensive. Just segment the list then bulk unsubscribe them. Takes up 5 minutes a month.
My client wants to send out a letter with JUST the unsubscribe option. If they don’t click unsubscribe, then they will remain on the list.
Does this approach suffice? Or is it a big No-No?
Hi Lauren,
That’s a perfectly acceptable way to prune a list. In that case, the focus would just be removing people who no longer want to be on the list instead of engaging people who are inactive. No problems there!
If they click NO though, doesnt it still affect your unsub stats? There should be a way to do this where clicking YES re-ads them but clicking no or clicking nothing doesnt harm your account the first time if done properly… does that make sense?
Adam, you’re right. Subscribers clicking “NO” will affect your unsub stats, but your account won’t be permanently affected. “Clicking nothing” won’t affect your account; it will just keep the user’s rating static.
You may receive a warning from our compliance desk since a high unsubscribe rate is normally bad, but since you’re cleaning your list, you can just ignore it. It’s certainly not a perfect solution, but rest assured we won’t boot you for being a good citizen.
[...] Update, 13.01.10: Hier noch ein weiterer Artikel, der sich mit der Reaktivierung von Abonnenten befasst: How to Reactivate Inactive Subscribers | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog [...]
Hi there,
I sent out my list today, and I’m a small-time mailing lister right now, with less than 500 subscribers. I feel that the 1% unsubscribe rate is a little unfair for the smaller groups, since that only means so far, that 7 out of my 500 subscribers have unsubscribed. But on a larger list, 1% is a lot more people. Based on the fact that people change their minds a lot about “junk email”, who’s to say that my account needs to be under review? Just a thought.
Hi Keli,
You’re right. For small lists, you need fewer complaints to trigger a warning because we look at complaints on a percentage basis. However, you should know that a 1% unsub rate just triggers a warning. Your account is not under review, nor is the account in any sort of trouble. We are just letting you know that a potential issue *might* exist.
If you’re running a reactivation campaign, it’s likely that you’ll receive a warning, but you don’t need to worry about it because you’re cleaning your list.
If you’d like to know more about these warnings, you can look at this page: http://blog.mailchimp.com/support/compliance/about-unsubscribe-warnings
i was told the same thing keli and my account still got shut down… if this comment doesnt get censored id love to join the discussion but ill wait until it make it though before i invest the time… there are legit reasons mailchimp has to enforce strict rules but the policy on reactivating email addresses is VERY unclear – your account CAN be shut down if you obtained emails legimately and import them to your account then get 1 or more abuse complaints per thousand even if the total is less than 50… there should be an absolute minimum number that overrides the percentage or a better way to opt IN again
Hi Adam, there are lots of factors we look at before shutting an account down; it’s not simply the number of unsubscribes in any given campaign. You can learn more about the process here:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/support/compliance/compliance-tips
If you believe you’ve been shut down unfairly, you can contact our compliance team here:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/support/compliance/about-unsubscribe-suspension
Just got a MailChimp compliance warning and I’m definitely looking into doing this, but I’m wondering… Is there a way to have a “yes” option without linking to my own website? Our website is handled by an outside firm and having them add a page to it is time consuming and a bit too spendy for right now. Lauren mentioned the unsubscribe only option, but I’d like to encourage a positive action
Haley, we recommend linking to your own site to reinforce the confirmation action, but it’s not necessary. If the link says something like “YES, I want to keep receiving your newsletter”, it’s good to send them to a page that confirms they’ll keep getting it, but that page doesn’t necessarily need to be on your site. It’s the clicking action that triggers the member rating in our system, not the page where you’re sending them.
I’m wondering if scheduling these three emails will work. Does the segment for sending the email get computed when the email is created or when it is sent?
So if I schedule all three emails a week apart will this work?
The segments are built when the campaign is sent, so you’ll have no problem scheduling all three emails ahead of time. We calculate users’ member ratings at the time your email is sent.
Hi Mark,
I am fairly new to mail chimp so would appreciate some advice.
I had a compliant warning from Mail Chimp so wanted to clean up my list before the next campaign – I followed your instructions on reactivating subscribers but accidently didn’t select ‘both’ in segmenting the list – so I selected any of ‘joined before 11/2’ (roughly when I first inputted anyone) or ‘membership rating less than 3 stars’. I have since had re-subscribes and un-subscribes (and another compliance warning).
I’m just wondering if you can tell me where I should go from here, in regard to the follow up emails – should I continue with the process, emailing a reminder next week to people which meet both categories (as they should have done in the first instance)
or continue with the email using the same categories as the first, which may just mean more un-subscribes?
And at the same time I was hoping to send a e-news this week, should I:
- send the e-news to all members of over 2 stars which should only target active people, but could also reach people that just had the re-subscribe email or
- wait to finish the 3 week re-subscribe process
any other ideas?
hope this makes sense.
Thanks
So I sent out my first email of the series and I have everything set up just like this post recommends. I sent the campaign to folks that had less than 3
stars.
So I looked at my report so far for this first email and see that 57 people opened it and 36 people who clicked. So I went to see who opened it and checked the member ratings. All but one person is now a three or four star member.
Did their rating jump just for opening the email? I thought it was only supposed to jump if they clicked on my link, and that’s how I can tell they want to get my emails. And I don’t have AIM reports to see who clicked where
Haley,
It’s possible that your subscribers’ ratings increased to three stars by opening your email. While my recommendations above are a good general guide, there are lots of different factors that contribute to the rating, so I’m sorry if I made it sound simpler than it is.
If you know there are subscribers that didn’t click but have higher ratings now, it may be better to ask those people explicitly to unsubscribe if they’d like (actually click an unsubscribe link); otherwise they’ll stay on the list. In this case, people who remain two-star members of your list are people who didn’t open the reactivation email (and haven’t opened any of your other emails). It would be up to you whether you want to keep them on the list or remove them.
After sending the first cleaning e-mail, I have 79 who opened, 6 unsubs and 26 total clicks. So am I right in saying that 20 of those clicks must have been on the ‘YES’ option? If so, how do I identify who on the ‘list of people who opened clicked the ‘YES’ and therefore are the ones to stay on my list? Also, an interesting thing is that when I look at the click map, it gives 100% on the ‘YES’ option – how is this possible if I have 6 unsubs?
Hi Angie,
I’m not sure I quite understand the issue you’re having, but I want to help you get to the bottom of it. The best way would be for us to take a look at your account. If you don’t mind, please send an email to support@mailchimp.com that includes your username, and mention this post and my name, and we’ll get it sorted out for you right away.
Hi Mark, thanks for the reply. I have gone over all the stats and realise they do make sense, ( I realise the clicks is tracking clicks to URLs not any hyperlink) but to get the level of info I need, i.e. specifically who clicked, I will have to get the AIM reports upgrade.
If I send Email #2 to my list, won’t the action of opening the email cause their member rating to jump to 3? It would not be true, then, to say “If you want to be removed from our mailing list, you don’t need to do anything further.”
Or am I missing something?
I sent my campaign already and just realized it’s been archived with all my other campaigns! … not exactly what I wanted, and I should have realized it would do that before I sent it.
Is there a way to remove it from the archives? Or make sure it doesn’t display on the archives page even before it’s sent?
Maybe I’m the only one who made this mistake but it seems like an easy thing to overlook.
It’ll only show up in your archive if you store the campaign in that particular archive folder. So, you could remove it from that folder.
Ben, not quite, I think what Lisa is referring to is the campaign archive that is “automatically generated” If you send an email to the list and they open in browser and “view past issues” at the top, they will see all past issues of the email list. It has nothing to do with moving the email toa different folder.
This is the only thing holding me back from cleaning my list with this process.
Paul, that’s what I meant, thanks!
I actually talked to customer support and unfortunately the only way you can avoid this is to make your own archive page on your website, using the MC archive code, and like Ben said, sort it into different folders. Then, disable the campaign toolbar in your list settings. That’s what I ended up doing. I really do love the features of the campaign toolbar but I’ve opted not to use it because of this campaign.
The ability to filter what displays in the “past issues” page accessed through the campaign toolbar would be a nice feature.
I think the best thing as far as a UI solution would be to have a checkbox in the campaign setup for “show in campaign archive” and have it checked by default.
Then we could specify that we don’t want the campaign in the normal archive so everything is smoother and easier (the thing I love about MailChimp)
Not sure how hard this is to do on the backend, of course.
Hi Mail Chimp
This is fanatstic info, and very helpful indeed!
I really would like to clean my list and ensure that I adhere to your compliance rules.
One question I have though is that I am going to be importing my list of ‘inactive and active subscribers’ from an excel document. I will therefore not be able to target those on my list who have been inactive for the last 6 months. I will have to send this campaign out to all on my newly uploaded list (which is fine because I’d like to clean the whole thing). This will however, not look very good to you guys when I get bounce backs and unsubscribes. I really want to avoid my account being shut down and want to know if you foresee my account being suspended as a result of doing the above.
Hi Devon,
If it’s a large list, you may consider using a service like Fresh Address to have it cleaned.
Otherwise, the best thing to do would be to send an email to the whole (old) list explaining that you’re updating the list and would like to know if your subscribers want to continue receiving email from you. Instead of trying to keep them on the same list, have subscribers interested in receiving more sign up for a new list instead — just create a new list in MailChimp, and link to its subscribe form in the call to action.
Like the series above, you can give people a couple opportunities to sign up. Generally, if people know who you are, if you explain what you’re doing and that you’re not going to keep bugging them, people won’t flag you for abuse.
hi mail chimp,
There system we currently have for unsubscribers is to manually remove them after they hit the unsubscribe link.
Our lists were generated though an online subscription form and paper lists at our events. We have been consistent in our newsletters since we started. Most people when they no longer want to receive enews hit the ‘unsubscribe; that goes to our inbox and we delete them before the next edition goes out.
Is it at all possible to get a list of the stale address’s and soft bounce address’s from our last mailout ( which had a 3% return rate ) so that we could manually remove those addresses?
cheers
Mark
WARNING TO MAILCHIMP USERS!
Be aware that these steps are broken. Once you get to step 3 and you need to unsubscribe, the bulk unsubscribe tool only allows 400-500 at a time.
Anyone with a meaningful sized list is going to waste hours copying and pasting all these in so “immediately” becomes a useless concept!
Will look into why it might be limiting to 400-500 at a time. Even if it is, I wouldn’t say it’s that limiting for the majority of our customers. Their lists are often small, and inactives would be yet another sub-segment of their lists.
After a couple of hours with tech support, it seems there is a bug with the bulk action. It only effects what is shown with pagination rather than the whole segment.
I strongly recommend not using the “member rating” in this case, because we have experienced bugs with that feature. some members have never opened or clicked any campaign and for some reason have 4 star rating, so you would not target those. We are doing our mailings with the 2 conditions:
1.) Person added to list at before DATE (e.g. 6 months ago)
2.) AIM reports –> Never opened any campaign.
Our experience ist that by doing this we also target users that are inactive and have more than 3 star rating (yes it is possible, dont ask me why, maybe a bug.
From 6 people who unsubscribed after last campaign, 3 subscribed back right away. I suppose they decided to check out the unsubscirbed link just for the heck of it.
) As a result, I received a warning from mailchimp about high unsubscirbed rate. Does mailchimp compliance guard takes into consideration that there were 3 unsubscribes actually but not 6?
DON’T DO IT! I contacted the compliance department before sending my campaign, and got this warning:
“Thank you for reaching out to us. The steps for reconfirming should be done outside of MailChimp, noting the account would still be subject for warnings or disabling should thresholds be exceeded.
ISPs, SpamCops and corporate firewall companies set thresholds regarding spam complaints, bounce and unsubscribe address totals. Should those thresholds be exceeded, blocks start to occur against the IP ranges and domains associated with the problematic content. As a bulk delivery service, we are required to enforce those thresholds.”
In other words, you’ll get flagged. Your dammed if you do or don’t. This sucks.
Here’s the Compliance team recommended way to re-activate dormant subscribers:
“To do this outside of MailChimp, follow these steps:
(If you haven’t created a list yet with data in the system, jump straight to step 3 after you do create a list under your account)
Login to Mailchimp and export your list by going to your lists tab -> finding the list in question -> click view list -> click view all -> click download.
Delete all the members from your list (but do not delete your list…you just want an empty list)
Find the sign up form for your list at Lists===>Forms.
Use gmail or outlook or your web server to send the members of your list an email containing the subscribe link from your mailchimp list.
They will then signup and be confirmed properly
That way you’ll definitely have their permission to email them, and we’ll have proof that they gave it to you. All lists need to be current and confirmed before we can send content to them.”
-Essentially skip to step 3. It’s probably the only safe way to do it, but it certainly makes for a riskier effort, and certainly more subscribers could be eliminated.
[...] while ago, Mark wrote about how to use MailChimp’s new subscriber engagement tracking to reactivate inactive subscribers. But I’ve been hearing from more and more customers (mostly publishers using jargon like [...]
This post is very helpful, unfortunately, I should have read it before sending our Campaign to ‘Update your Subscription’ or ‘unscubscribe’ if you no longer want to receive emails from us.
While I expected a lot of unsubscribes (as the list has not been used since December 2010, and we are changing the way we send emails) I did not expect to receive so much Abuse Complaints, specially while trying to do the right thing.
Feeling really deflated and wondering if we should have stick to the ‘old way’ (Outlook). Nah, I still love Mailchimp!
Where do we go from here?
I wanted to note that this blog post was very helpful — and very well thought through. I’m going to start reading the blog and pouring through for more tips and golden nuggets o’ monkey wisdom
[...] a targeted reactivation campaign to them sooner. MailChimp has some great campaign resources on how to reactivate inactive subscribers as well as a resource guide dedicated to this [...]
check out your code much more carefully b4 putting any information up…esp…spaces…and oh so many other faux pas.
How to Reactivate Inactive Subscribers | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog http://ow.ly/5WxrY
I would like my account reactivated so that i can receive the email alerts for the Total Beauty website.Eventually i would like to be able to shop on that website as well which i am unable to do until my account is reactivated.
You’re saying you are a subscriber to total beauty’s emails, and you are no longer receiving them? I’d contact total beauty about that. That’s not something we can access on our end.
Thank-you for this article and thank-you very much for the comments everybody … I nearly learned as much from them. Thanks especially to Maleko & Ben (and others) appreciate all your knowledge to help newbies like me.
Great post! Thanks heaps! Wasn’t aware of “reactivation.”
Since we are a club, my campaigns contain only information for our members. I’m not selling anything, so the click rate is low. Many club members receive messages as “text only” or view their email in a preview screen and don’t ever click anything. Therefore, their rating may never go above 2 stars. Will this eventually become a problem for my list?
Hey Secretary, I work in the Deliverability department at Mailchimp, so I thought I’d field your question. The quick answer is no, this won’t be a problem.
We know our Activity Star system isn’t perfect for the exact reasons you described. It’s just not possible for us to capture every action a subscriber might take. That’s why there is no penalty for having two star subscribers. They’ll never be demoted to 1 star just for looking inactive.
On the receiving end, ISPs like Gmail take a very hard look at engagement activity. Fortunately, ISPs don’t need to use the same tricks we do. They know when their users open a text only email, preview an email, or just delete it without reading. So no matter how it looks on the Mailchimp side, the ISP is more than happy to deliver your email to engaged subscribers.
I’ve just seen this article and subsequent comments and I think it would be a very good idea for us to send a series of three emails to our list in order to remove those who no longer want to be on it and to re-engage those who do.
However, I have one important reservation about this, which you may be able to help with. Just reading through the comments above, it seems like there is a lack of consistency on what happens when the emails are sent out. I’m a bit worried because of the possibility that sending these emails out will generate quite a high number of complaints.
On one hand, Mailchimp’s Mark has said, “…rest assured we won’t boot you for being a good citizen” but on the other hand, according to Maleko, Mailchimp’s compliance department has said that accounts would still be subject to warnings or disabling should thresholds be exceeded.
So, I want to be a good citizen but I also don’t want my account to be disabled. What does Mailchimp suggest I should do? Send re-engagement emails or not?
Thanks, Katie
Send a re-engagement email when you feel like it’s time to clean your list. If you set off alerts with our compliance team, all you have to do is answer them like a human, and explain what you’re doing. They’ll reinstate if they see you’re just trying to clean inactives.