Email Diva: Industry Standard For List-Cleaning

Over on Email Insider, Melinda "Email Diva" Krueger provides some wise advice on list cleaning best practices.

Two second summary:

Get non-responders off your list.
Test reconfirmation/renewal re-engagement methodology

I love it. If it's not yet considered industry standard practice, it's about time for that to change. Removing people who haven't clicked in years removes dead weight without killing your list. I regularly see it improve ROI, as you get the spamtraps and complainers out of the way, leaving only the people who actively want your mail and are most likely to respond. And you improve their ability to respond, by clearing out the bad addresses that cause spam filtering and blocks.

Read it, bookmark it, share it with your friends. This info should forever be ensconced in your personal "Email Marketing 101" handbook.

Al Iverson

I've lived in Chicago since 2006. I spend a lot of time in hotels. I spend the time catching up on emails, blogging, writing shell scripts, and solving complex email-related equations. The system says I've been a Blogger user since April 2006. Actually, most of my sites are far older -- spamresource.com in particular has been a dumping ground for my thoughts on spam going back to 2001. I've been doing the whole "blog thing" for years, before I knew to call it blogging. I'm a jazz fan and my favorite club in the world is the Artists' Quarter in St. Paul, Minnesota.

2 Comments

Comments

Spamfighter1:44 PM, April 10, 2007
is great advice, except for ... the people who use email for band recognition and don't expect click-throughs and the like, and for list managers who get paid by the address sent, not even delivered or acted upon.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Al Iverson2:28 PM, April 10, 2007
List managers focused on brand awareness campaigns still measure clickthroughs and opens, still strive to drive clicks, and need to be able to get their mail through. I find this advice quite compatible with those goals.

As far as the second case... People who shovel as much mail as possible with no care to response rates or inbox delivery will definitely not care about cleaning the old junk off their lists. I don't plan to lose much sleep over it.
ReplyDelete
Replies