Recently I worked on an email campaign with an opt-in list that hadn’t seen any contact for nearly a year. It was for a small company that gave up on email marketing because it wasn’t seeing any real results. I expected to see a lot of bounces, several spam reports, and a low open rate. I was surprised at the final report:

The core report shows us the campaign was sent to 2,453 subscribers. As expected, about 20% of the email addresses bounced. What wasn’t expected was only three spam reports and 16 opt outs. That’s pretty good for a company that was likely forgotten by many of the recipients.

The open rate was a healthy 21.4%! In fact, save for the bounce rate, all the numbers were better than the average reported for the online/offline retail industry by Constant Contact. According to the solution provider, the average open rate for this industry is 18.01% (and that’s with regular mailings). The average click rate is 13.99%, though this client’s campaign received a rate of 23.7%. The spam-report rate average is .21%, and this campaign had a rate of .12%.

What does this show us? That it’s never too late to reach out to your email list and re-introduce yourself.

A few key points:

The mailing sent did include some important information to remind subscribers who the company is and why they had originally subscribed. This included:

A personal message from the company’s manager.

A reminder that the recipient had signed up for the mailing list.

A special offer exclusive to the subscribers.

Last week I sent out a similar email to the subscribers of a list one of my own companies runs. That list hadn’t been touched in about 18 months (we were totally restructuring everything). While that site is still going through the revamp, the mailing invited people to sign up for the mailing list for this site.

The results of this email were also above average and the mailing list for this website grew. My company’s list was much larger, yet less than 20 people opted-out, and there were fewer spam reports.

If you’ve been sitting on a list of opt-in subscribers, now’s the time to remind them about who you are and what you do. Worst case scenario is they opt out of your mailings for good. Don’t wait, though – the longer you do, the better the chance of them ignoring your message.