Hi Stephanie

I can see where you are coming from and appreciate the opportunity to debate this with you, however I am surprised you think that my point is an excuse for poor email marketing – I have never been accused of advocating that before!

I prefer to think of my blog posts in terms of challenging people to think beyond conventional wisdom especially when that wisdom is driven by vested interest and purveyors of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Where to begin?

First of all it is important to point out that my thoughts only relate to retention campaigns i.e. email activity aimed at people who are already customers or have specifically asked to receive information about a brand or product.

In your post you state that I am talking about the “edges,” not the core of a good email marketing program. You are absolutely right about that!

Where you completely misunderstood me is when you make the assumption that we do not put our talent energy and resources into the rest of the program first – we DO! Nor was I advocating that other email marketers should ignore their active customers. Believe it or not, continuing to mail people who haven’t opened an email in a while and doing your best to engage or strengthen your relationship with your active subscribers (to paraphrase you) are not mutually exclusive. I would also like to make it clear that I was not in any way suggesting that it is a good idea to mail certifiably dead email addresses.

The point I am making is that very few of the inactive email addresses ARE certifiably dead; the vast majority do not open emails they receive because they haven’t need your product or service (think hotel, car rental or furniture) for a while and not because your email program has failed them in any way.

Yet almost all “best practice” documents seem to advocate indiscriminately purging your list of every inactive/dormant/unresponsive subscriber every 12 months or so. Despite the consistency of this best practice advice the vast majority of email marketers continue to send to long term non openers. Given that every ESP and most email marketing experts have been saying the same thing for years most email marketers must be aware that they are doing the “wrong” thing.

So are they all really bad professionals/working for disreputable companies or could it be that the experts proof is less than convincing?

The problem with best practice is that it is usually written by people who have little or no responsibility for the outcome of an email campaign. And once best practice becomes received wisdom very few people can be bothered to publicly challenge the assumptions that it is based on. They just ignore it.

As far as I can see the main (only?) reason email marketers are advised to remove inactive addresses from any list is because they might be honey traps monitored by ISP’s. And as we have been told emailing a honey trap email address will damage a brands reputation with the ISP’s and messages will be more likely to bounce or be delivered to the junk folder.

However, as most practicing email marketers know, things are never that simple!

In the real world:

• The people on your list are either customers or have opted to receive email from you.

• You cannot assume that everyone who has not opened for any given time period definitely wants to be removed from the list.

• It is almost impossible to actually prove the scale of any negative financial impact caused by sending email to dead addresses.

• The cost of continuing to send email to these people is very low.

• The revenue generated by addresses that become active after a long period of inactivity can be very significant.

Faced with a choice between hard numbers such as the low cost of mailing inactives and how much revenue is generated by their email programs and the mostly theoretical cost of a bad reputation (based on an average of 20.7% of commercial emails failing to reach 337 seed inboxes), it is hardly surprising that so many email marketers working for well known and reputable brands ignore “best practice” advice when it comes to inactives. Because they know that while you can say every dead address, honey trap or person who does not want your email will not open it; you cannot say a person who does not open your email is a dead address, honey trap or does not want to be on your list.

No one disagrees that it is a good idea to remove certifiably dead email addresses so telling them that achieves nothing. What email marketers really need help with is how to ensure that they are not culling apparently dead people who are happy to be on the list and plan to re-engage in future – the unemotionally subscribed.

Regards
Dela