Should You Send Emails To Inactive Subscribers?

Andrew Donovan
2 min readMar 14, 2022

Marketers can often hold two conflicting and (seemingly) opposite truths in their head at once.

Here’s an example from my own head:

  • Truth A: You should send a re-engagement email to inactive subscribers and remove contacts who no longer want to be on your list.
  • Truth B: You should keep inactive subscribers on your list because one day…maybe…they may purchase from you.

Both of these things are true.

While you should provide an out for inactive subscribers — not only because you don’t want to annoy them, but because you want to keep a high deliverability rate — there is a case to let sleeping dogs lie, so to speak.

Here’s a great example that was posted by a connection on LinkedIn:

(Read the full article here)

Instinctually, I found this to be true because I’ve sat on email lists for YEARS with barely a pulse, and then one day, I’ve made a purchase thanks to the right email coming through at the right time.

In fact, our organisation recently closed a client looking for a new website after being

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Andrew Donovan

I’m the lead email marketing specialist for a boutique marketing agency in Ontario, Canada.