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.

Spam works
Another kind of email breach

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Broken signup processes

DJ Waldow wrote a post on explicit permission over on Mediapost. I think he hit on some interesting bits and wanted to comment on them. In order to comment on a Mediapost blog, you have to register.
I’ve thought about it before, but every time I start the process I get to the page asking for detailed demographic information and decide no. This time, I was inspired enough by DJ to get to the second page of the signup process. This requires me to identify what type of marketing I’m interested in and won’t let me past the page until I click something. I’m not interested in anything, so I close the webpage. I can always write my own blog post responding to DJ.
I return to my inbox to discover a welcome message from Mediapost. It seems I am now a member and will be receiving email and specials and all the stuff I didn’t want from them.
This isn’t unusual. There are tons of websites on the net that don’t require you to complete a signup process in order to be added to their database. One of the worst I experienced was 1-800-Pet-Meds. They added me to their database when I abandoned a cart (what I wanted required a prescription from them, whereas I could just go into my vet’s and pick it up, so I’ll just pay the vet’s prices). They added me to their mailing list and couldn’t unsubscribe me because I was not in their customer database. Everything was done with the magic order number, which I didn’t have because I never ordered with them. That was fun to sort out.
It’s a bad idea to add people who don’t complete the signup or purchase process to your mailing lists. If you’re worried about losing a potential customer, then you can send mail reminding them to complete the process (or purchase). If you’re very into customer service, you can ask them if they are interested in future specials from you: would you like to opt-in to our mailing list anyway? Or you can give them the opportunity to remove their information from your database.

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Don't take my subscribers away!

Tom Sather has a good summary of the problems with inactive email addresses and why data hygiene is critical to maintain high deliverability. These recommendations are some of the most difficult to convince people to implement.
Some of my clients even show me numbers that show that a recipient that hadn’t opened or read and email in 18 months, suddenly made a multi-hundred dollar purchase. Another client had clear numbers that showed even recipients that didn’t open for an entire year were responsible for 10% of revenue.
They tell me I can’t expect them to let their customers go. These are significant amounts of money and they won’t let any potential revenue go without a fight.
I understand this, I really do. The bottom line numbers do make it tough to argue that inactive subscribers should be removed. Particularly when the best we can offer is vague statements about how delivery may be affected by sending mail to unengaged users.
I don’t think many senders realize that when they talk about unengaged users they are actually talking about two distinct groups of recipients.
The first group is that group of users that actively receive email, but who aren’t opening or reading emails from particular senders. This could be because of their personal filters, or because the mail is going to the bulk folder or even simply because they don’t load images by default. This is the pool that most senders think of when they’re arguing against removing unengaged users.
The second group is that group of users that never logs in ever. They have abandoned the email address and never check it. I wrote a series of posts on Zombie Emails (Part 1, 2, 3) last September, finishing with suggestions on how to fight zombie email addresses.
Unlike senders ISPs can trivially separate the abandoned accounts from the recipients who just don’t load images. Sending to a significant percentage of zombie accounts makes you look like a spammer. Not just because spammers send mail to really old address lists, but a number of spammers pad their lists with zombie accounts in order to hide their complaint rates. The ISPs caught onto this trick pretty quickly and also discovered this was a good metric to use as part of their filtering.
I know it’s difficult to face the end of any relationship. But an email subscription isn’t forever and if you try to make it forever then you may face delivery problems with your new subscribers.

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Brand engagement in social media

Adobe has a good post up about consumer reaction and interaction with brands in social media like Twitter and Facebook.

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