How do you bring back users who are no longer active?

[AjayJunkies]

We will have all been through this at some point or another, we have members and they are active daily, always posting and engaging with the community and then one day, they stop logging in and we wonder what could have happened and why they didn't come back.

This happens more often than most community owners seems to let on so it is always wise to have a plan in place for when this happens.

What method do you use to entice members back who were once active? Have you found a method that works?

 

[peteGSX]

I'm curious to see what others think of this too.

Our forum is very quiet, and it's always been a little quiet, but since changing domains (we unfortunately didn't own the original domain and the original owner has health issues and isn't contactable) it's gone deathly quiet, with just a few stalwarts hanging around, and even fewer actively contributing. I'm guess most have bookmarks to the original domain still (despite multiple messages to update before the original domain expired).

My only plan at the moment is to start circulating a monthly update of news and what's new via email, although I need to figure out a way to do that with bulk email that doesn't exceed our cPanel hourly and daily limits which I'm working on now.

I figure if the reason really is that the bookmarks are the old domain, and email in their inbox with yet another reminder of the new domain name and a link, maybe at least some of them will come back.

I did get some feedback from a user a little while ago that he forgets to log in, and it's only the email notifications for content that remind him to do so, which is the other reason I'm going to start with some regular (but not too often) bulk emails.