You have a number of customers sitting on your email marketing list who do not respond to your campaigns. You leave them on there for ages hoping that they might, for some unexplained reason, suddenly burst into activity. 

All they actually do is to mess up your returns, making a successful campaign seem less productive, and an initiative appear not worth the while. With a little application you can either turn these subscribers into profit or be able to delte them in confidence.  

What makes a subscriber inactive varies from business to business and three months of no response can be the norm with some products. Once you have decided what makes yours fall into the definition, target them.

The first thing to do is remove them from your main email marketing list. This is to ensure that you do not send other marketing emails to them during this exercise. It will also improve the metrics of your main campaigns.

Given the number of inactive subscribers you have you might want to create two or more sub-lists, depending on how you identified them as unresponsive or which are the hot prospects. For instance, those who do not open emails, those who open and do not click through and those who click through but do not complete.

You will then need to decide on your tactics. For those who do not open, a change of Subject Line; those who do not click through, a change of email design; for those who do not complete, reduced prices to get them into buying mode.

The one essential is to try and discover any common features of those on the individual lists. Perhaps location, age or position in a company, or a mixture of all three, will point the way to how you could change your email marketing campaigns.

At the end of a campaign of targeting the unresponsive subscribers, do not just return them to the main email marketing list. Consider whether you should have a specific list for those who require, for instance, a more refined approach. Also, be prepared to ruthlessly discard those who do not respond. Effort costs.

Targeting unresponsive subscribers has many benefits, not only those of getting them to buy. Dependable metrics from your main list alone is worth the effort.