Do you try and contact members who have been inactive for a while - either automatically or manually - in an attempt to draw them back to your site? How successful have you been?
At first I did, but decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Now, I send out an annual mass email stating that dormant accounts will be deleted if members don't at least log in. They get 4 weeks to do so and it seems to be succesful as I have only deleted 3 accounts in the last 2 years. Saying that, if peeps aren't visiting and posting maybe they have moved on to pastures new....
Az, I took a page from your book and let my members know about our recent conversion to XenForo. And the site was pounded with traffic for a couple days. Three weeks on and things have settled down a bit, but we're getting more active members and more posts than we were getting prior to the conversion. I'm examining options on sending a "newsletter" on a regular basis, as a bit of a reminder. I don't know I want to do it monthly, but I'm considering once each quarter.
I used to send newsletters to inactive members, only thing it ever did was caused some long-dead logins to log in and disable admin emails, then log out again. The majority of them actually bounce as the email addresses are either dead or fake.
Your email brought me back Personally, I wouldn't mind an email to those who opted once in 3 months or so. Just wondering if it will make our email and ineffect domain or spam list.
heh heh heh - in my case I wasn't targetting inactive users, I was just letting everyone know of changes I don't like sending out emails too often
It's hard for a site like mine. I go into some of these sections on my site (ones that I generally don't go in) and read a few threads and see people with a few thousand posts and I've never seen them on the site before. So for me, it's kind of hard to manually go and talk to people about coming back. What I've done is just talk to old members that I was good friends with that had been with the site almost from the start and when we have updates to the site, just mention it to them and ask them to check it out and see what they think. That only consists of like 5 people though...as most old members don't get on their old AIM's anymore. So yeah....I really don't contact any inactive members. Maybe I should once or twice a year.
I did contact inactive members with a quarterly mass newsletter, or spoke to those I knew on social networking sites to inquire as to why they weren't online much. As a member though, I find it relatively irritating when I'm pounded by a monthly, or even weekly, newsletter for a forum I'm not a part of. Sure, I unsubscribe and what-have-you, but I shouldn't have to resort to that.
I was considering sending out an eChristmas card to inactive members. We even had a competition for a bit of fun to design the card. Now I'm not sure how to do it. I can't see any way to mass mail users without revealing everybody's email address to the world. I'm using vB 3.8.4. How do you guys do it?
I try to keep tabs on members who have been active in the past, and for some reason, haven't posted for a while. I'll send a private email to them just to make sure everything is OK in their neck of the woods. Many reply back thanking me for thinking of them, especially when things are not going so well for them.
