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A typical mailing list has more than 50% of recipients that are inactive. By By inactive, we mean those recipients that have not opened and/or clicked on your emails in the last 3 months or longer. 

In MailUp, you can quickly find out what this figure is for each of your lists by looking at the gray area in the Recipient analysis chart in your MailUp admin console under Statistics > Email > Analysis and Benchmarks (e.g. below is a visual example).

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Why is this important? Because more
More and more email account service providers (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) use "recipient engagement" as a fundamental indicator of whether your messages should be delivered to the inbox or not.

Are recipients opening and/or clicking? How often?

The higher the number of recipients that are inactive, the lower - by definition - will be your engagement level and the higher the chances that - over time - your messages may end up in the junk folder.

Here's a simple example. Let's say that around 15,000 recipients open your emails - on average - and you mail to 100,000 people. So your open rate is around 15%. Now, let's say that 30,000 of them are inactive: they have not opened or clicked on any message in 90 days or more. If you decided not to email to them, your open rate would instantly increase to 21.42%. That's a 43% increase in "engagement"!

This topic is so important that you can find a tremendous amount of literature on it. For example, take a look at this case study by Marketing Sherpa.

Clearly, there are two two conflicting priorities:

1. You don't want to reduce your recipient list
2. You also don't want to end up in the junk folder

What should you do then? The answer is to try to re-engage as many "inactive" recipients as possible and - for those that you are unable to re-activate - reduce the amount number of messages sent to them, eventually unsubscribing them.

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Step 1: locating inactive recipient using  using activity filters

Under Marketing+ > Filters > Activity, create an Create an activity filter to  to locate recipients that did not open or click on a message in the last N days. N can vary depending on how frequently you email to your customers:

• If you email frequently (e.g. once a week), you can set N to 90 (i.e. recipients that have not clicked or opened in the last 90 days)
• If you email rather infrequently (e.g. once a month), you may want to set it to a higher value (e.g. 180 days).

Here is how the activity filter will look. 

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Now create a new filter adding some more time to the amount number of days that the recipients have been inactive.

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Once you've created both filters - which you could assign to a "Re-engagement" category - you should see in the list of Activity filters:

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You can now use these filters:

1. At any time to locate recipients in your List
2. When executing a manual mailing: select the filter that you wish to use in the the Choose recipients page  page (the mailing setup page)
3. When executing an automated campaign using triggered messagesusing tasks

Before you actually send the messages, though, let's step back for a second and think about what kind of message you  you may want to send to try to re-engage inactive recipients.

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The goal of the campaign is to to win-back and  and try to engage the inactive recipients. Effective "win-back" emails include:

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The timing and number of emails is are up to you to decide. Best practices include:

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Our friends at Email On Acid found a a good one from L.L.Bean, for example.

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Second re-engagement message: you're going to miss out on...

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In MailUp this third message is the the Email to inactive recipients that  that can be found under under Settings > List settings > Notifications

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The best way to go is to execute the campaign automatically, using triggered messagesusing tasks. This means that re-engagement messages will be sent over time, as recipients become inactive.

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1. Create a new triggered message
2. Give it a descriptive name (e.g. "Re-engagement campaign | Message 1")
3. Set it to run every day and set the event trigger as a match on the first Activity filter that  that you had set up (e.g. in this example, No click or open in the last 180 days)
4. In the the Action tab, select the first re-engagement message that you prepared for the campaign, enter From name, From email, etc. and save the triggered message
5. Use the simulation feature to see how many recipients would be a match if the triggered message were executed right then
6. If everything looks good, enable the triggered message
7. Repeat the same steps to create the second triggered message of the campaign, making sure to select the second Activity filter and  and the second message prepared for the campaign

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Sending the third message (and unsubscribing)

The third message is a special one in that it automatically triggers a change of subscription status. For this reason, it is handled separately in MailUp by using the Inactive recipients' management area of the Settings > List settings > Preferences page page. See See managing inactive recipients for  for details on the settings found on that page. This is an important feature as it allows you to gradually remove from your list recipients that you have not been able to re-engage.

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• You can do this manually by excluding one or more groups of inactive users (created by using using activity filters) from one or more mailings.
• You can also allow active recipients to reduce the mailing frequency on their own (before they tune out and become inactive) by activating the the Preference Center.

Step 4: Evaluate your re-engagement campaign

Did it work? Re Re-engaging inactive recipients is not an easy task. Typically, between 5-15% recipients re-engage and remain in your mailing list.

Re-engagement campaigns are a hot topic and good content is getting written all the time. Do a search for re-engagement campaign and you will find plenty of updated content.