What Are the Best Practices for Using Email Reminders with Mailing Lists and Newsletters?

Question

From time to time I receive email reminders which always give me an overview of all the mailing lists for which I’ve signed up years ago. I still regard this as helpful although these mailing lists aren’t used frequently but I experienced that sometimes people are sharing interesting thoughts.

Now I’m thinking about the dozens of newsletters I signed up for but never received anything until now. Probably I can’t remember half of them.

Are there any best practices on how to use email reminders to keep users interested– maybe even without communicating anything new?

Here is an outdated question as a starting point but maybe there is something to add: Email Reminder Best Practices

Answer 1

The principle that social networks and mailing lists use is same for newsletters. Sending a well crafted overview of top posts from time to time is a good strategy how to re-engage readers. But... combined with measuring how much you spend on creating these summaries compared to how many people you re-engage into your content. (That's a pretty tricky thing in real to get solid data about this.)

Why you see this as an activity of social networks and mailing lists is that social networks have a lot of content and good data about what is the top and favorite post. The content is their business and they invest into algorithms or people to pick the top things. This is what regular newsletter sender does not do. (Either they are too small and don't have too much content to pick from, newsletter is not their primary channel to keep customers engaged and they invest just minimum into it, the marketing guy/team can't deliver data that it's worth investing into creation of these emails, they don't know about this strategy...)