When To Email An Inactive List
By Anna Johnson on July 28th, 2008Got a list of email subscribers you haven’t contacted for several months or more? When should you email them again… or… should you email them again?
Sure, the upside may be to bring those subscribers back into your sales funnel and sell to them again. Unfortunately, the downside may be having your email dumped in junk folders and widely regarded as spam…
According to Rebecca Lieb, writing for The ClickZ Network, the average email list is subject to a “churn” rate of about 30 percent per year, meaning that about 30 percent of email addresses in a given list will no longer be valid after a year. Unless you remove this 30 percent from your list – and you won’t know which email addresses constitute the 30 percent if you haven’t actively emailed the list – you’ll end up with a host of bounces when you email the list again.
This may not matter if you have a small list, but it could be a big problem if your list numbers in the high four, five and six figures.Internet service providers – the companies that actually deliver your email – don’t like it when thousands of emails bounce. They’re inclined to regard anyone who causes so many bounces to be a spammer. Consequently, they may mark your email as spam before it even reaches your subscribers or, worse, blacklist your email server IP address (the computer that sends out your email).
Even when your email reaches your subscribers, if they haven’t heard from you for months, they may have forgotten signing up to your list in the first place and may be hostile towards your message. They too may mark your email as spam or complain to their ISP such that you have your email earmarked as spam or blacklisted.
So should you or shouldn’t you email an inactive list?
I’d be wary about sending an email to a customer list that’s been inactive for 9 months or more and a non-customer, optin list that’s been inactive for 6 months or more. Ms Lieb suggests you try to segment your list in terms of activity or time of optin, and email only those who have been relatively active or are relatively new.
When sending the email, write a subject line and email that acknowledges you haven’t emailed for some time, and move the opt-out link to the top of the email. This makes it easy for someone to unsubscribe if they’re put off by your mailing (and possibly easier than clicking some other button like the “mark as spam” button!). Also, be sure to personalize your email, using the subscriber’s name if possible.
You might also try a progressive mailout, so you can monitor the response and bounce rate generated among groups of subscribers before continuing, modifying or pulling the campaign as necessary.
Source: Rebecca Lieb, “Inactive E-mail List: Mail or Don’t Mail?” The ClickZ Network, July 18, 2008
