We were working with a client to help identify inactive subscribers – those who hadn’t opened or clicked on an email in many months.  The assumption was that these people no longer wanted to receive the email but just hadn’t taken the time to unsubscribe.  We were looking at various changes to the newsletter, and we were interested to see if we could learn anything from this group (e.g. why were they no longer interested in the content and what information might they find more useful) so we decided to send a small segment an online survey as a test.  The first question asked them to rate the value of the newsletter with the expectation that the newsletter would receive low scores.

The survey actually received a good response rate, especially given to whom we sent it, and the respondents gave the newsletter a surprisingly high rating (4 out of 5).  Also, interestingly, a number of people indicated that they hadn’t received an email from the company in long time. 

So, while there were certainly subscribers who were no longer interested in receiving the email newsletter, there were many that still wanted it but a deliverability problem may have been preventing the emails from getting to the inbox.  The overall deliverability to the inbox was very good for this email (as measured by a 3rd party monitoring service), but this information will allow us to work with the email service provider to identify whether there are deliverability issues that our 3rd-party monitoring isn’t discovering.

Therefore, unlike the situations where a friend was listing all of the reasons why a girl didn’t call him back and you had to have that difficult conversation informing him that she just wasn’t that into him, this was a situation in which she was (at least some of them were).