The Email Delivery Guru

I ran across this blog post on the DMA UK's Email Marketing Blog today. In it, Simone Barratt talks about what you should do about inactive recipients on your list. (Apologies; I've lost track of which other blog linked to this post.) She capably covers a lot of the marketing concerns around inactive subscribers - what constitutes engagement, what to consider when trying to decide whether or not to write off a list segment.

Go back one blog post on that very blog, and author Guy Hanson explains how he was "gob smacked" by the thought that deliverability is a subject that "most companies are just waking up to," and that nobody touched on the topic of sender reputation. Simone, Guy, maybe you should chat. Here's why:  Simone's article leaves out a very important consideration: Deliverability, and how mailing to inactive email segments can negatively impede your ability to deliver mail successfully.

My point is, make sure you take deliverability into consideration. Sometimes, the best strategy for dealing with inactive list segments is to jettison them. Yeah, I know, what an anti-list growth point of view. But consider that one of the most recent big changes in deliverability and reputaton metrics is the inclusion of engagement as a reputaton measure by ISPs. Meaning if you have a big old list and very few people ever interact with your emails, you're going to end up with a low sending reputation, and your deliverability will suffer as a result.

Sure, when exactly to define somebody as dead is going to vary, and maybe there are instances in which a different contact strategy or message frequency can save the day. But if hanging on to every single email address on your list forever is likely to cause you problems, it becomes quite the catch 22. It doesn't matter if everybody opted-in to your list; it matters what percentage of recipients show life on the other end of that email message. The hope that someday they might wake up and buy another product for you, in a lot of cases, is going to be overtaken by the disappointment that you can't get messages through to them anymore, because the ISP decided to block or bulk your mail. What's more important? Having the biggest list possible, or having solid inbox deliverability? Sometimes you can't have both.