List Attrition

DJ over at Bronto blog has a post up about list churn / list attrition. She quotes a statistic published by Loren from MediaPost (the original post is behind a subscription wall) that a list will lose 30% of their subscribers year over year. This is similar to a statistic that I use, but the context I have seen the published statistic in is slightly different. DJ offers suggestions on how to reduce this churn. All the suggestions are great, but I think that they slightly miss the point. There are multiple processes that can be described as list churn. One is churn DJ addresses, that is people unsubscribe from a mailing list. The other is people abandon their email addresses. Individual mailers have some control over the first type of churn, but almost no control over the second.
I think the study Loren was quoting describes the second phenomenon not the first. In 2002, ReturnPath published a study that showed 31% of people changed email addresses in a single year. Understand, this does not mean that 31% of recipients on any particular list will actively decide to unsubscribe from a list or report it as spam or otherwise unsubscribe from that list. This is 31% of all email address owners will get a new address and abandon their current one. There are a few reasons for the churn.

  1. Email addresses provided through an employer do not carry to new employers.
  2. Recipients change ISPs.
  3. Recipients change email addresses at ISPs, often to avoid high levels of spam.

Engaging users may help convince them that mail is worth enough to subscribe with their new address. However, senders will still see addresses drop off their lists. The person behind the email address is no longer using that address.
Not all subscription and delivery problems are under the control of the sender. Address abandonment is one of those problems.

CAN SPAM rules take effect
AOL announces web support tool

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How much mail?

Yesterday I had a call with a potential new client. She told me she had a list of 4M Yahoo addresses and she wanted to mail them twice a day. Her biggest concern was that this volume would be too much for Yahoo and her mail would be block solely on volume. As we went through the conversation, she commented that this list is also being used by someone else she knows and they were getting inbox delivery at Yahoo on every mailing.
From other bits of the conversation, I suspect that these are not the only two people using this list, but I have no feel for the volume. But how much email is each person on that list receiving a day?
I have a current client who is in a similar field to the above potential client. I signed up for their list back in December. Since then I have received 1728 emails to the address I used on their site. 4 of those emails have actually been from my clients, the rest were stolen by a partner of theirs and sold off to all sorts of mailers. Yesterday I received 40 emails.
I just cannot see how this is a valid, long term business model. The bulk of these mails are advertising payday and other kinds of loans. Some of them are duplicate offers from the same senders (judged by CAN SPAM addresses) using different From: lines. The mailbox these mails are filtered into is completely useless, it has been swamped by loan offers. I cannot imagine that anyone, even someone looking for a loan, is receptive to this much email. The only thing I can figure is that the mailers believe that if their email is the one at the top of the mailbox at the exact moment the recipient gets most desperate for money in their bank account tomorrow they will make the sale and get paid.
This model is going to be less and less viable as time goes on.
On the permission level, there really is no permission associated with that email address. Sure, I could call up the former client of mine who mailed that address today and challenge them to show me where they got the address and they would probably tell me they bought it from that company over there. But when I submitted my email address to my client’s site, I did not expect to receive offers for Mickey Mouse Collectible Watches. It certainly is not what I signed up for.
Not only is the permission tenuous, but ISPs are moving away from a permission based model for access to their subscribers. What they really care about now is how recipients react to email. An email marketing model based on getting as much email in front of the recipient as possible will be harder and harder to be profitable as ISPs get better at measuring how much their subscribers want email. The mailers who get good delivery are those are able to make the mail interesting, wanted and relevant to recipients.
It is difficult for me to imagine a case where you can make 2 emails a day relevant to 4 million recipients.

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That's spammer speak

I’ve been hearing stories from other deliverability consultants and some ISP reps about what people are telling them. Some of them are jaw dropping examples of senders who are indistinguishable from spammers. Some of them are just examples of sender ignorance.
“We’re blocked at ISP-A, so we’re just going to stop mailing all our recipients at ISP-A.” Pure spammer speak. The speaker sees no value in any individual recipient, so instead of actually figuring out what about their mail is causing problems, they are going to drop 30% of their list. We talk a lot on this blog about relevancy and user experience. If a sender does not care about their email enough to invest a small amount of time into fixing a problem, then why should recipients care about the mail they are sending?
A better solution then just throwing away 30% of a list is to determine the underlying reasons for  delivery issues, and actually make adjustments to  address collection processes and  user experience. Build a sustainable, long term email marketing program that builds a loyal customer base.
“We have a new system to unsubscribe people immediately, but are concerned about implementing it due to database shrink.” First off, the law says that senders must stop mailing people that ask. Secondly, if people do not want email, they are not going to be an overall asset. They are likely to never purchase from the email, and they are very likely to hit the ‘this is spam’ button and lower the overall delivery rate of a list.
Let people unsubscribe. Users who do not want email from a sender are cruft. They lower the ROI for a list, they lower aggregate performance. Senders should not want unwilling or unhappy recipients on their list.
“We found out a lot of our addresses are at non-existent domains, so we want to correct the typos.” “Correcting” email addresses is an exercise in trying to read recipients minds. I seems intuitive that someone who typed yahooooo.com meant yahoo.com, or that hotmial.com meant hotmail.com, but there is no way to know for sure. There is also the possibility that the user is deliberately mistyping addresses to avoid getting mail from the sender. It could be that the user who mistyped their domain also mistyped their username. In any case, “fixing” the domain could result in a sender sending spam.
Data hygiene is critical, and any sender should be monitoring and checking the information input into their subscription forms. There are even services which offer real time monitoring of the data that is being entered into webforms. Once the data is in the database, though, senders should not arbitrarily change it.

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The key to inbox delivery: make your email relevant.

Following on from previous posts here, here and here, JD Falk discusses ways to get your email into the inbox.

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