Question: I enjoyed last month's article, Email-Deliverability Trouble Spots, and I took your advice on re-opting-in non-responding subscribers who have never opened or clicked our newsletter.

But given the number of subscribers who are not counted as opens because they read the text-only version of our newsletter or because images are blocked in the HTML version, how do I avoid annoying happy subscribers with a re-opt-in message when they are, in fact, reading our newsletter?

Answer: You are absolutely correct that email-marketing software underreports the number of opens. (For a full explanation of why this happens, read the Email Experience Council's blog post, "How Opens are Tracked and Reported.")

So, if you send a re-opt-in campaign to people based on their open metrics, you will, in fact, reach a subgroup of people who do actually open your messages, but who just aren't counted as opens because of technological limitations.

One way to get around this is to take open rates out of the mix and define a nonresponder as anyone who hasn't clicked a link in any message over a set period of time:

• Pro: The click-through metric is a stronger indicator of engagement than the open metric, without the technical ambiguity.
  
  
• Con: Since far fewer users click than open, you run the risk of cleaning out a much larger portion of your list than if you use the more forgiving open metric as part of your engagement barometer.

Another way is to modify your re-opt-in creative approach. Instead of starting with a straightforward "do you still want our newsletter" message, you can warm things up first by sending your nonresponders a special offer of some sort with a strong click-through call-to-action. Done correctly, this will wake up a large percentage of your dormant base, and then your explicit re-opt-in message would go only to the smaller subset of remaining nonresponders.

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About the Author

David Fowler is the director of email strategy, deliverability and privacy compliance for Lyris. He consults with email marketers to help them get better results from their email programs.

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