Old lists have bad delivery

This is something we all know is true, and something that everyone believes. But, Mailchimp has actually published numbers demonstrating just how bad old lists are.

Stats for the “Inactives” list (241,832 recipients):
Spam Complaints: 43
Open Rate: 6%
Click Rate: 2.4% (and 7,688 total clicks)
Unsubscribes: 264
Bounces: 6,878 (2.8%)
Stats for the “Actives” list (69,642 recipients):
Spam Complaints: 3
Open Rate: 36.3%
Click Rate: 7.4% (and 6,925 total clicks)
Unsubscribes: 96
Bounces: 128 (0.18%)

This is very clear data showing senders should think long and hard before mailing that list collected over months and years. Older lists have much, much worse stats, both in terms of delivery and in terms of recipient response, than newer lists. It also demonstrates that failing to mail people regularly does hurt delivery.

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Do you know where your addresses go?

Being a deliverability consultant, I end up signing up for a lot of lists and providing email addresses to a lot of different websites I may not normally trust with my email address. The only way to manage the resulting volume of email is using a disposable address system. There are a number of commercial versions, but we built our own system.
Any time I need to sign up with a client, I create a new email address. Part of the address creation process involves making notes about where and when the address was used. When mail is received at any of the email addresses I have used, that email is appended with the data I provided at the time I signed up and forwarded to a mailbox on my main system. If an address ends up compromised or sold and getting too much mail, I can just turn it off. This system allows me to freely hand out addresses, without a large amount of mail ending up in my primary mail box.
Disposable addresses great way to monitor what my clients are doing with my email address. I have found, in at least 2 cases, that my clients are doing nothing wrong, but there are leaks in their process that lets email addresses get out to spammers. My reports of data leaking were the first they knew about any problems with their vendors or customers.
I strongly recommend any marketer who shares any data, include in that data test or seed accounts. Sign up for your own lists, using unique addresses, so that you can see what kind of mail your subscribers are receiving once they sign up at your site. If you are providing data to customers or vendors, include unique test data in each list. If you start getting unexpected mail to those addresses, you can track back to the specific vendor with the data problem.
Your email address list is one of the biggest assets your company has. Protect that asset by monitoring what others are doing with it.

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Unsubscribe policies

Our local brewpub has an email list. For various reasons I have multiple addresses on the list and finally decided that getting 4 copies of each mailing was silly. About a week ago, I sent in unsubscribe requests for 3 of the addresses. Today I get another 4 copies of their mailing. That’s not good. Luckily, I know one of the delivery folks at their ESP so I send her an email.
I know unusubscribes can take a few days to process, but it has been seven and CAN SPAM is pretty clear about the 10 day requirement. My first email to their delivery expert is just asking how long unsbs normally take. She responds they take 3 – 4 days. Uh Oh.
I tell her I unsubscribed these 3 addresses (with the unsub links) on 6/10 and received more email this morning. I did tell her that there were multiple subscriptions and they were all legit, but the reasons were really not important. Just that I didn’t want quite so many emails and their unsubscribe process seemed broken.
Now we get to the part where it all goes a wee bit pear shaped. The next email I get back from her explains why I am on so many lists. Fair enough. The more concerning bit is that they have not only gone through their database and unsubscribed all my addresses, but they have also found Steve’s addresses and unsubscribed those too. What the email does not contain is an explanation of why their unsubscribe process broke.
At this point I am a bit annoyed. I did not want all my addresses unsubscribed, just some of them. And the bit about unsubscribing Steve? That’s just silly and unnecessary. Another round of email ensued, pointing out this is bad and please put everything back how it was except please unsubscribe these three addresses I sent originally.
Things are back how they were, although the technical staff is still looking into how their unsubscribe process broke. The initial thought is that during a technology transition they lost some unsubscribe requests.
This whole process has bothered me for a number of reasons. One is the utterly cavalier attitude of the delivery people at the ESP. Their unsubscribe process broke. This is, to my mind, an emergency. ESPs have been fined for broken unsubscribe processes. Two is the process of unsubscribing addresses that belonged to a completely different person. The ESP did explain the policy behind that, sorta.

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Spam or not spam

I have been a bit behind on my blog reading recently, and am slowly going through my RSS feed catching up with what everyone has had to say about spam in the last few weeks.
One of the articles that caught my attention was a post from VerticalResponse discussing the response to a marketing campaign from one of their customers. It seems to me the point of the post is to defend the VerticalResponse mail to the customer. The mail VerticalResponse sent was not spam. Why this is true is not made clear, other than the mail was not pills spam, phishing or porn.
Contrasting with that article is a post a friend pointed out to me today. This article goes to the other extreme, and seems to say that any one-to-many email is spam and should not be sent. While trying to find his point, the author does take the step of exempting any opt-in marketing from his definition. The confusing bit is that the statistics he is using are compiled by MailerMailer, who have a very clear anti-spam policy and allow only permission based marketing.
What both posts seem to be missing is that, these days, spam is in the eye of the receiver, not the sender. There are customers who groan every time they receive mail from their vendor. Eventually, they may lash out at a sender and complain about the email. At that point, a sender is now dealing with an angry person, and arguing the mail is no spam is not going to diffuse the situation. On the flip side, there are people who are very happy to receive mail, even advertising and marketing mail, from vendors. Even if they do not “open” the mail (read: load images in the email), they may be opening, reading and acting on the offers in the email.
Email marketing is a valuable tool, when it is done correctly and focuses on the receiver’s needs and wants. It is when marketers ignore the individuals they are mailing that they are more likely to see complaints or problems.

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