Reaching out to inactive users

Discussions
#1

We have users that have not signed in years. We are thinking of reaching out to them to say something along the line - hey you have an account with us, would you like to keep it? If not then we’ll remove it.

Then we can remove their account if they don’t sign in or respond.

It sounds like a good idea but I wanted to run this by you guys to see if we are missing something or making a mistake doing this.

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#2

Sounds like a reasonable idea. It is always good to keep your user database clean.

But be aware of the following:

  1. emails sent after a long break tend to have abysmal open rates. Don’t expect many responses from this.
  2. if you haven’t been regularly emailing these users, a significant % of your recipients will have forgotten who you are. In some cases, they’ll mark your email as spam
  3. as a consequence of point 2, there is an increased chance of gmail, etc categorising your future emails as spam

If you go ahead, please let us know how it goes. I might have to do the same thing one day!

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#3

For future… is it possible to add in your terms & conditions document that if an account is not used for x years, it will automatically be deleted. Just want people’s opinion here.

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#4

I stopped trying to do that when I saw my open rates for E-mail. I consider myself lucky if I get 40% of people to open an E-mail, and some E-mail updates get an open rate of as low as 11%. Depending on what the Borg Filter (Google’s Gmail) decides, your E-mail will either reach the users Inbox, or land in a dark place to be ignored forever. This means that any kind of “reaching out” makes little sense.

But on the other hand: why do I really care? Why do I need to remove accounts at all? I’ve designed my system so that an account costs essentially nothing. If people want to sign up and then not use the system for years, why not?

All this is obviously valid for free/freemium accounts. For paid subscriptions I do suspend the accounts fairly quickly if the payment is past-due, but then for paid subscriptions I don’t really want people’s money if they don’t use the app anyway, so this case is very different.

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#5

Wow! I just logged in after a long, long time. I signed up this time last year, but really haven’t gotten to being active here. Hope I can change that :slight_smile:

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