E-mail List Killers: Complainers Can Get Your Messages Blocked
Deleting inactive addresses from a house file may be the last thing most traditional direct marketers would do, but it’s becoming a necessity in e-mail.
For one thing, all the major Internet service providers — AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo! — use subscriber complaint rates as the standard to determine whether to block incoming e-mail.
So the trick is to eliminate the addresses of complainers and potential complainers. But how?
Some people will hit the “this is spam” button as a convenient way to opt out. In fact, 41% of consumers surveyed by e-mail deliverability company Return Path recently said they sometimes do just that.
As a result, inactive e-mail addresses can be dangerous.
John Possidente — a consultant who manages Internet service provider relations at Agora Inc., a holding company for publishers of financial, health, travel and other special-interest books and newsletters — is very familiar with the pain of trimming e-mail lists, but says it’s always paid off for him.
His first experience with e-mail list cleaning is the kind that can take years off a marketer’s life. Several years ago one of Agora’s e-mail newsletters was getting blacklisted and its deliverability was suffering.
“It was nobody’s fault, but it got to the point where the e-mail just wasn’t getting through,” he says.
So Possidente took an action he recommends only in the most extreme cases: He re-opted in the entire list. And from a file of 400,000 e-mail addresses, just 45,000 reconfirmed their subscriptions.
Ouch.
“It was horrifying,” he says. “I was the list manager at the time. I knew it was the right thing to do, but when the numbers came back, I was like: ‘Oh, jeez, I’m fired.'”
However, as difficult as cutting nine out of 10 addresses from the newsletter’s list was, the revenue it generated went up because the people on the list became more responsive to offers from Agora. “That taught us how scary it could be, but it also taught us the results aren’t as scary as you might think,” Possidente says.
Possidente has not re-opted in a whole list since, but he’s done several partial purges for Agora and they’ve all boosted the lists’ financial performance.
Still, he cautions, e-mail list cleaning is not to be undertaken halfheartedly. The person doing the job must have the backing of everyone in the organization who can halt the project.
One of the worst things an e-mail marketer can do is send an aggressive reactivation offer to all inactive addresses and threaten to remove them if they don’t act — and then fail to drop them when they don’t.
It’s crucial to narrow the effort down to troublesome list segments. Possidente starts by identifying everyone who’s made a purchase. “They are absolutely not eligible for a cleaning,” he says. And inactives? Dump ’em. “If they haven’t done anything with you in six months, they probably aren’t going to,” Possidente says.
