It would be nice…

It’d be nice to have a tool to uncover the zombie email addys, but until then, read this from @wise_laura: http://bit.ly/jxjZ9M Kelly Lorenz

There’s currently not a programmatic way to make those determinations, but this is where the relationship between senders and receivers comes in. All you have to do is ask recipients what they want. I know, I know, most marketers have a low opinion of the ability or desire of their recipients to respond to an email. And there are some actual challenges to getting a recipient’s attention when they’ve tuned out a particular sender or type of email.
Separating out zombie addresses from real addresses is a challenge. But it’s part of maintaining a healthy email marketing program. When I’m working with clients who are mailing old lists we first talk about their product and their goals. Then we look at what information they have for recipients. My goal is to separate out those addresses we know are good from those we know are bad from those we don’t know. It’s the ones in the don’t know category that we focus on.
I don’t recommend just deleting the addresses that are non-responsive. One of the reasons is that I read mail with images off by default and so I often look like one of those non-responsive recipients even when I’m actively reading and receiving mail. Instead, I like to look at what other data the customer has about a recipient to help classify them. Of course, there are often a subset of users we cannot identify if they’re zombies or not. For these addresses we plan a re-engagement campaign.
Clients who have gone through this process have seen an improvement in delivery and an improvement in responses and ROI.
Until and unless ISPs start rejecting mail for zombie accounts it’s the best chance senders have to separate the barely there from the not there at all.

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Zombie email: Part 3

Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses.
A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of some email marketers, doesn’t come back to life. The person who initially registered that address has decided to stop using that email address.  The defining factor of a zombie address is that there isn’t now and won’t be anyone in the future reading email sent to that address. There is no human there to read or react to any email sent to that address.
A zombie address does not represent an actual recipient, they’re just remnants of a recipient that once was present.
Having a list containing any significant number of zombie addresses can throw off metrics enough to mislead a sender about the effectiveness of their email marketing program. Sometimes, the zombie addresses make the metrics look worse, sometimes they make metrics look better. In either case, the metrics don’t accurately represent the performance of a marketing program.
Zombie email addresses do bulk out a mailing list, making lists look bigger. They’re not real addresses, so they don’t reflect quality, but they do impress marketers that think bigger is always better. But, in reality, you may as well add thousands of addresses at non-existent domains for the real value these addresses bring to your list.
Zombie email addresses on a list depresses any metric that use “number of emails sent” or “number of emails accepted” as a denominator.  If 10% of a list is zombie addresses, then an open rate reported as 15% will actually be an open rate of 16.7%. The more zombie addresses on a list, the more the statistics will be depressed.
In addition to having lower open rates, lists with more zombie addresses also have a lower complaint rate. In fact, in the recent past spammers have padded their lists with zombie addresses as a way to artificially lower their complaint rates.
Spammers using addresses created just to bulk up the denominator and lower complaint rates have led ISPs to start monitoring the types of addresses on a particular list. I first heard about ISPs looking at recipient profiles at a meeting in 2006, so it is not, in any way, a new technique for ISPs. What is new is the number of zombie addresses on legitimate, well maintained lists, and the fact that they are present in high enough volume to affect reputation and delivery.
ISPs use zombie addresses to monitor the reputation of a sender because it is a more accurate way to measure what the recipients think about an email and that sender. Senders ignore zombie addresses because they make some stats look bigger (total list size) and better (lower complaint rates). Many senders also believe that addresses come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary, and will not purge an address for any reason other than it bounces. They’d rather live with inaccurate and misleading metrics than removing non-performing addresses.
Tomorrow, in the final post of this series, we’ll examine how senders can identify potential zombie addresses and what steps they can take protect themselves from the negative reputation hit from zombie addresses. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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Zombie email: Part 1

Zombie email addresses: those email addresses that never really die, eat your brains and destroy your email delivery. To understand zombie addresses and why they’re just now becoming a problem, we really need to understand some of the history of email addresses.
In the early days of the net, people got an email address usually associated directly with their access to the Internet. Many of them ended with .edu or .gov. I even had one that ended in .BITNET for a while. The first ISPs followed this convention. Users signed up for an account at a local dialup and were assigned an email address, and that was their email address. It wasn’t until the late 1990’s where there was widespread access to multiple email addresses.
What this means is that when people left a job, or canceled their Internet access their email address went away. Addresses that were abandoned would, after a short period of time, start bouncing back with user unknown, giving everyone the opportunity to stop mailing that account.
Even with the advent of multiple addresses for a single account and the easy availability of free addresses from places like Hotmail addresses that had been abandoned would still bounce off a list. Why? Because accounts had limited storage. My first dialup account had, I think, 10MB of space. It may have been as much as 20MB, but it wasn’t very much. Accounts receiving a lot of mail that weren’t checked frequently would fill up and start bouncing mail. Senders would be able to remove abandoned accounts because they were full.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about two things happened in the early 2000’s that changed email and led to the rise of zombie email.
Zombie Email: Part 2
Zombie Email: Part 3
Zombie Apocalypse

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