If you’re wondering why your email subscribers have gone quiet, you’re not alone: Many people find that eventually, their mailing lists stop working as well as they used to and subscribers stop engaging. This article goes over several possible reasons your audience is less engaged.

Your Messages Aren’t Helping Achieve a Purpose

Email subscribers don’t sign up for lists for fun. They do so because they have a purpose in mind. Examples of purposes include colleagues in your industry wanting to stay abreast of what your business is doing and individuals who are researching products like those your company offers. Consider implementing a (very short) questionnaire that shows up when people sign up for your list to learn about each subscriber’s purpose.

The Content Isn’t Personalized

This point ties in with subscribers’ purposes: If the content isn’t personalized to help each subscriber get what they want out of being on your list, they are much more likely to disengage and unsubscribe.

But as digital marketing expert Neil Patel points out, personalization doesn’t mean just slapping a subscriber’s name in the subject line and calling it a day. Instead, Patel recommends using the aforementioned data collected from your sign-up questionnaires and tools like personalization apps. It’s also a good idea to allow your subscribers to modify their preferences.

They’ve Been Around Awhile

As time goes on, it’s very natural for email subscribers to become inactive—as in, they stop engaging. This means that you shouldn’t pay attention to the number of total subscribers so much as your total number of active subscribers. After enough time passes, it’s safe to stop chasing disengaged subscribers and focus on the ones still around.

They Get Too Many Emails

Reshu Rathi of the Search Engine Journal advises that it’s possible to burn email subscribers out by sending too many messages. One strategy to avoid this is to put a hard cap on the frequency of emails. You might also consider a technique called dynamic frequency, which puts larger gaps between emails sent to subscribers who are beginning to disengage.