Given that at least half of your e-mail address list can probably be
classified "inactive," the question of what to do with this silent
faction is highly relevant to e-mail marketers, especially in these
tough days when you're being asked to make more sales with less budget.
This issue came up at the recent Email Evolution Conference, where
attendees were asked to vote whether purging or retaining inactives
should become the e-mail industry's best practice.
However, the solution goes much deeper than "always purge" versus "always retain."
I support removing some classes of inactive addresses after
identifying and attempting to reactivate them (details in my earlier
ClickZ column, "The Right Way to Trim Inactives").
This doesn't mean you should dump anybody who hasn't acted on your
first few e-mail messages, or even everyone who hasn't opened or
clicked in two years.
Presumably you collected those addresses through reputable means, so
they represent a considerable investment. Replacing them can often cost
more than you spent to acquire them.
Why Target Inactives?
Your inactives probably aren't generating spam complaints or bounces. So why stir things up? Here are four reasons:
- They aren't helping you reach your business goals,
which mostly means you aren't making any money from them. Instead,
you're spending money to send them e-mail they're ignoring.- They depress your true list performance, in both campaigns and any prelaunch optimization testing.
- ISPs are beginning to watch how often commercial e-mailers send to nonresponding inboxes as an added reputation factor.
- Long-inactive addresses can be turned into spam traps. Sending to them can get your messages blocked or filtered.
Three Tactics for Managing Inactives
Whether you choose to segment out inactives or let them slumber in
peace, these three tactics will help you manage inactivity to improve
list performance:
- Segment out inactives in optimization testing.
If you conduct optimization tests before launching e-mail campaigns,
your inactives might be watering down your responses and making it hard
to determine the actual lift of your tests. Have you ever done an A/B
split test on, say, the call to action where the difference was small,
like a 29.4 percent CTR (define)
on one version and 28.6 percent on the other so the test was
inconclusive? One likely culprit is the denominator (audience selected
for the test) is heavily weighted by inactives, suppressing the
response rates.If you have a strategy for determining active versus inactive
subscriber status, you can run your tests against each segment as well
as against the whole list and compare the active segment's performance
to the full list. In some cases, this testing could wake up a portion
of your inactive file. But if you look at the test only across the
whole audience, you might find the winning strategy is more difficult
to see.- Separate your former clickers from your never clickers.
Experts regularly debate about how long a subscriber has to go dark
before you can consider the address inactive, but what about those
people who signed up with you and never acted on any of your e-mail?
You shouldn't have to wait six months to a year before moving your
never clickers to an inactive program, assuming you've done all you can
to entice them into acting.This is an excellent argument for conducting a systematic welcome
program, one that invites action by clicking through to fill out a
profile, claim a special offer, or answer a short survey. (It's also an
argument for double opt-in instead of single opt-in, because it demands
a little more action from the subscriber to get on your list, but
that's an argument for another time.)Somebody who never acted has a lower value to your e-mail program than
somebody who stopped acting. With this latter group, you can at least
try to recover them with a reactivation campaign. You gain nothing by
continuing to send messages to those who ignore every mailing from the
minute they opted in.- Use inactives to hunt down problems with collection sources or processes.
This strategy is a must if a significant percentage of subscribers have
never acted on your messages. You most likely collect e-mail addresses
from multiple sources (your official Web opt-in page, affiliate sites,
coregistration programs, offline sources, etc.). Review your inactive
file by source to determine if one collection method contributes a
larger share of inactive addresses. You might find that a source
delivers addresses that never engage. In that case, investigate the
sign-up process after you remove inactives who never clicked.
One Final Thought
If your goal as an e-mail marketer is to send your messages to as
many people as possible because you believe your messages have value
whether your recipients act on them or not, then by all means, never
remove an inactive e-mail address.
However, if deliverability is important and if you want to ensure
your active recipients get the opportunity to engage with your e-mail,
then list pruning should be a ritual.
Until next time, keep on deliverin'!
Stefan Pollard – Responsys
Last 5 posts by Stefan Pollard
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