The Challenge

Most email marketers have an inactive segment of their file that they treat as radioactive. And for good reason. Addresses of people who haven’t clicked for, say, a year or more pose deliverability threats. 

Sending mass emails to long-dormant addresses risks the mailer being labeled a spammer and getting blocked from reaching not just those addresses, but the addresses of their best customers, as well. The simple answer to avoiding the danger inactive addresses pose is don’t mail them.

But not all inactive addresses are radioactive. Some are potential gold. Failing to mail them means leaving money on the table. The trick is identifying them. But how?

Enter Alchemy Worx: In a partnership with email platform LiveIntent, Alchemy Worx has developed a technique for identifying the addresses on an inactive file that are the best candidates for reactivation and strategically mailing them to get as many as possible clicking and buying again. 

How it Works

LiveIntent delivers advertising into a network of thousands of email newsletters reaching hundreds of millions of individual addresses.

As a result, LiveIntent can take an Alchemy Worx client’s inactive addresses, match them against their massive network and identify the addresses that are active, just not with that client.

LiveIntent can then feed the active-elsewhere addresses back to Alchemy Worx in small, manageable batches so the agency can try and reactivate those addresses with aggressive reactivation offers.

“Let’s say I’m a retailer with 10 million email addresses, 2 million of which are inactive,” says Joseph Levy, head of business development and partnerships, Alchemy Worx. “One option would be to mail them reactivation offers in small batches, but that’s going to take forever.” 

Also, the metrics for those mailings are going to be dismal, he adds.

“LiveIntent will score the names, hand some back and say ‘of the 2 million, here are the names you should mail this week,’” he says. “When I mail to that group, I’m going to get open, click and purchase rates much closer to an active audience.”

The process is ongoing, where LiveIntent feeds batches of active-elsewhere names to Alchemy Worx and Alchemy Worx feeds addresses that have just met its client’s definition of “inactive” back to LiveIntent.

“This process allows me to slowly and safely add from the 2 million inactive addresses back to the 8 million,” says Levy. “And unless there is some sort of miracle where all 2 million inactives start engaging, I don’t see a need for an exit point.” 

The Results

Having honed their technique, the folks at Alchemy Worx know they can mail the addresses LiveIntent scores highly at a significantly higher cadence than unengaged addresses.

Using this technique for cosmetics company Laura Geller, Alchemy Worx was able to achieve an 89 percent lift in click rate and a 40 percent increase in revenue per delivered email while sending them four times as much messaging as a control.

“The real value of the platform is to be able to identify who is scoring very high and who we can confidently mail more often, whereas if I tried to mail the entire list at that cadence, I would run into a host of deliverability issues,” says Alexandre Yale, head of analytics for Alchemy Worx. 

Let us help you pull gold from your inactives. Reach out to us at the link below for a free consultation to learn more.