Email Reputation - Clean Out the Dead!

I read a good article on email reputation the other day by Ralph Wilson at Web Marketing Today. He supplies 11 great tips on improving your delivery rate. In these tips, he rightly advocates removing bounced recipients and finding ways to engage and woo back subscribers, but leaves out one critical tip: clean out the dead!

Particularly if you've been sending email for a long time, it's likely that you have an extremely large percentage of your database that is not interested in receiving your emails. Don't take this personally, it's a natural consequence of time and shifting interests.

"Email is cheap," you might say, "why would I cut people out of my list?" Well, a pattern that I'm starting to see is that if you've been sending emails for a couple years or more, if you're using responsible email practices, and if your open rate is less than 20%, it's likely that 50% or more of your database is effectively dead.

Let me give you a couple examples. I did one project this year where we experienced problems migrating a large list from one email vendor to another. Deliverability was an issue after migrating the database and we needed to act fast. In this case, I filtered the list down so that it included only people who had opened an email in the previous year, had purchased a product in the last 18 months, or had joined the list in the last 3 months.

The result was that we reduced a list of 2.9 million subscribers to a list of only 1.2 million. Sounds scary, doesn't it? When I saw the size of the new list I thought I was in big trouble. That said, a funny thing happened when we deployed the next newsletter.

Although we had cut the list by almost 60%, we still got 90% of the typical response in terms of opens and clicks. While it would have been nice to have kept that last 10%, the huge cost savings of reducing the deployments by 60% and the improvements to deliverability meant that our roi went through the roof and the cost savings more than made it worthwhile (as well as justifying my fees for quite some time).

More recently, I worked on a database about half this size with similar results. The only difference in this case was that without the deliverability crisis we had more time to tinker with the final segmentation rules for who we kept and who we removed from the database.

In this case, we were able to get to a point where we balanced the "age" of the subscriber against their activities in the past 2 years and were able to cut the list size in half while maintaining virtually 100% of the open and click activities as compared to past mailings.

Again, the cost savings and the improvements to deliverability made this a tremendous win and in one fell swoop we virtually doubled the roi on what we were paying to deploy emails.

Bottom line: if you have a large list and have been sending email for over a year then you could achieve some significant cost savings by cleaning up your database.