On any email list there will be those who respond regularly, those who are not quite as frequent and also a number who buy something on occasion. It is an unfortunate fact of email marketing that there will also be a number who fail to respond in any way. This last group, let us call them dormant, can be dangerous. If they habitually fail to open marketing emails and instead delete them or mark them as spam this can have a serious effect on deliverability.

The simple way of responding to this threat is to identify those on your email lists who are dormant. How you classify them will be entirely dependent on your specific business model. Frequency and value of product can make a massive difference in email marketing.

You might think that I’m going to tell you to delete this dormant email list. However that is an anathema to anyone engaged in email marketing, and quite rightly. What you have to do is to try to and change them in to active subscribers.

The exciting thing about working with any email list made up of those of no value is that you can experiment on them without fear of it costing you. That said it should always be remembered that obtaining any email address would have required some form of financial outlay, so let’s not go silly.

You need to establish why this group are dormant. Is there anything that links them? There might be some simple common feature, such as a country of origin. If so you would need to check to see if there are any in your main email list and note whether a high enough proportion is dormant. If so it could be worth your while to separate all of them and place them in their own specific email list.

Firstly though, you need to experiment with your dormant list to see if you can change your marketing emails sufficiently to make them active. Once you have cracked this you can make the decision whether or not to go with the demographic as a whole.

You have little to lose. It is not often you can say that about addresses in email marketing.