Dormant User

For a long time companies judged a product by one number: registered accounts. More sign-ups was a good sign, and no decline was at least not a bad one. Then a product with 100,000 registered accounts would find that only 20,000 of them showed up this month, and nobody had an answer for what to do about the other 80,000.

The problem was that people who had closed their account and people who simply were not showing up sat in the same bucket. Their situations are not alike. Someone who closed an account was disappointed by something and decided to leave. Someone who is just absent never made a decision at all — they were busy, they forgot, or nothing came up that needed the product.

With no distinction, there was only one response available. Marketing mailed the entire list, and a message asking people to come back landed on someone who had written a document the day before. That person unsubscribed out of confusion, while the people who had been gone for weeks never opened it. Dormant user is the name for the part of those 80,000 who can still realistically come back.

You set the criteria first, then pull the list of people those criteria catch. Three things have to be decided.

1. What counts as activity. Counting logins alone marks someone active for tapping a notification and leaving a second later. Pagedeck counts only opening, editing or commenting on a document, and excludes notification clicks.
2. How many empty days make someone dormant. The number comes from the product's own usage rhythm, not from an industry standard. A tool people use daily might set 14 days; one used a few times a month might set 60. Pagedeck found that eight out of ten sustained users return within seven days, and set the line at 14.
3. What ends the dormant state. Decide whether a single visit clears it or whether the person has to actually create something. Let a visit clear it and everyone who cracks open an email counts as revived.

The important property here is that dormancy is a state, not a label attached to a person. It means the current conditions match, and it lifts the moment somebody comes back. In gym terms this is not the member who cancelled but the member who is two months into not showing up. The door is still open.

Once the criteria exist, the rest runs on its own. A nightly job rebuilds the list of everyone the conditions catch and records when each person entered it. Someone on day 14 and someone on day 90 cannot be addressed the same way, so time-in-state becomes the raw material for whatever comes next. It is worth writing the three decisions down somewhere the whole team reads, because a marketer and an analyst who each picked their own definition will report two different dormant counts for the same week and spend the meeting arguing about which query was wrong.

The list gets used in three directions.

1. As the audience for messages that invite people back — the most common use. A trigger message can go out the moment someone crosses the line, or a drip campaign can spread one message each across day 14, day 30 and day 60. The channel is usually email marketing, and personalization fills the content in per person. Naming the last document someone had open and announcing a new feature do not get opened at anything like the same rate.
2. As material for reading metrics honestly — a single registered-account number says nothing about the state of a product. If sign-ups are rising while the dormant share rises alongside them, new arrivals are not sticking. That ratio is one of the inputs lifecycle marketing uses to decide which stage deserves more effort.
3. As a lead on product problems — pull together what people did in the days right before going dormant and patterns appear. At Pagedeck, people who created three documents alone and invited nobody went dormant at a noticeably higher rate. That was not a problem email could fix; the invitation flow was. Read this way, the list works less like an audience and more like a report on where the product loses people.

Products sold by the seat use it on the sales and customer success side too. If a company bought twenty seats and twelve have been dormant for weeks, the renewal conversation is likely to start with cutting the seat count. The response there is a call to the account owner asking what the unused seats are stuck on, rather than another email.

"Three thousand people went dormant last month and four hundred came back."

Entries into the state and returns out of it are being counted separately.

"Let's exclude dormant users from this campaign — it'll wreck the open rate."

A list heavy with people who will not open drags the overall numbers down, so leave them out of this one.

"Moving the dormancy line to 30 days makes the number look better and finds people later."

Loosening the criteria shrinks the list without changing anything except how late you notice.

At Pagedeck, Ravi reviews the list weekly. He puts the count of new entries next to the count of people who left the list, and when entries keep outnumbering exits he hands it to Mia to look at the product instead of rewriting the message. There is a ceiling on how many people email can pull back, and when they arrive faster than that, no amount of sending shrinks the list.

Plenty of teams read the dormant count as a number to drive down. It appears in reports like any other metric, so it looks like one to manage. But this number moves the instant you change the criteria. Stretch 14 days to 30 and the list halves that day while nothing has improved. Once that reading takes hold, a team reports progress by intervening later and later, missing the window when people were still likely to come back.

Believing one email can revive them is the other common mistake. Returning users are visible, so it reads as though output scales with sending. Real return rates often sit in the single digits, and continuing to mail people who never respond piles up unsubscribes and spam complaints. That record damages the reputation of the sending domain, and billing notices to perfectly healthy customers start landing in spam folders. This is why teams decide in advance how many reactivation attempts a person gets before the sending stops.