Is it really worth your time, effort and resources to reach out to your inactive members? Look at the chart that accompanies this story, which represents the percentage of inactive members on a sample of EmailLabs' client mailing lists.

Figure 1.1 emphasizes why you need to know your inactive rate and develop strategies that will both reduce the rate and re-engage members who don't open or click.

Note that even the sender with the lowest rate of inactives – which we defined as members who did not open or click on any emails sent to them for six months (July 1 to Dec. 31, 2005 in this case) -- lost more than one-quarter of its list to nonresponding members. In general, inactives make up 30% to 50% of a typical mailing list. That's a lot of lost potential.

These numbers emphasize the points we made in an earlier Intevation Report article (12 Tips To Re-Engage Your "Inactive" Recipients):

List inactivity is a depressing but inevitable fact of life with mailing lists. Your newest members are usually the most active and involved readers. Drop-off is greatest in the first three months or so but stabilizes after about six months, depending on your mailing frequency.

Once you know your inactive rate, you can work to reduce it by engaging new members earlier, being explicit about what you will send, when and how often,  identifying inactive readers and approaching them directly either to re-engage with you or unsubscribe.

We have mapped out an easy-to-follow strategy for all of those objectives in Combat List Inactivity by Older Opt-Ins and 12 Tips To Re-Engage Your "Inactive" Recipients available free in our Resource Center. Check them out for more reasons why you must identify and target your inactive members for greater email ROI and metrics performance.

Figure 1.1: Inactives