Zombie Apocalypse

I hope my series on zombie addresses has convinced you that there are zombie addresses on your list and that you should be concerned about the effect they have on delivery and metrics. Today I’d like to talk about what you can do to get rid of zombie addresses without affecting too many actual subscribers.
Anti-Zombie Weapons
One thing that many companies struggle with while dealing with zombie addresses is letting go of addresses. They are so tied up in the idea that a bigger list is better that they can’t let them go. Even if a particular address has not had any activity in 18 or 24 months, they insist that they can’t give it up, it might come back and the customer might make a giant purchase. No. It’s a zombie. It’s not coming back, except to eat your brains.
The first step to dealing with zombies is to acknowledge their existence. They are there, they are on your lists and they are dirtying up your lists. Pretending they’re not there does not make them go away. They are zombies. In no case is there a human inside. There is no potential sale lurking, waiting to jump out and act on that perfectly crafted offer.
The second thing to remember is that the humans that used to have the zombie addresses found you once and they are still interested in what you’re offering then they will find you again. They may even already be back on your list with their new email address.
While you can’t identify zombie addresses specifically, you can identify addresses that act like zombie addresses. These are addresses that have no activity over a long period of time, more than 12 months. For these addresses that haven’t had activity in 12 – 18 – 24 months, you want to confirm with the recipient that they are there and want to continue to receive mail from you.
The best way to notify them is to send an email asking if they want to remain on your list. If they fail to act, you will remove them from future mailings. Short, sweet and will let you drop off zombie addresses without much effort on your part.
I know, I know, you aren’t ready to let go so fast. After all, some people have come back after 24 months and made a purchase from the perfect offer. They’re not dead yet! OK. But you can’t get a response from them through email. They just don’t care enough about what you’re sending. That’s when you contact them through another channel.
For instance, if the email address is tied to a web account, say a social networking site or bank account or a web forum, you can also contact the user through your website. Next time they log in, send them a message that says their email address has been removed due to inactivity, but if they want to reactivate they can do so at the subscriber preference center or profile page. When they do, send them an email to confirm that this is the address where they want to receive mail. At this point you can give them a link or a magic cookie to past into the website to verify the address.
Or if you’re a bigger retailer you can send alerts to your customer service staff, so when the account holder contacts you by phone with a question or an order you can get an updated email address. If you have a loyalty program, have an alert come up at the point of sale and the clerk can ask for an updated email address.
I even know one company that would send postcards to their zombie accounts in an effort to re-engage them and get an active email address from them.
If the person never comes back, if they don’t ever interact with your business again, if none of the channels work to contact them and update the address then it really is best to just let the relationship go. It may not be you, or anything you’ve done. People move on, their interests change and that’s part of life. They may have moved outside of your service area, or they may have joined your list for a specific product that they don’t need or you don’t sell. They may have died and turned into a real zombie. In any case, they are not a viable prospect for your mail.
Email addresses and business relationships are not forever. Letting zombie addresses go is important for the health of any email marketing program.

Related Posts

Zombie email: Part 2

In zombie email: part 1 I talked about how email addresses were tightly tied to internet access in the very early years of the internet. We didn’t have to worry about zombie email addresses because when an account was shut down, or ignored for a long time then mail would start bouncing and a sender could stop sending to that account.
There were two major changes to email accounts in the early 2000’s that led to the rise of zombie emails.
People started decoupling their internet access from their email addresses. Free addresses were easy to get and could be checked from everywhere. No longer did they have to dial in to get email, they could access it from outside the office and outside the home. Mobile devices, including the first generation of smart phones and laptops, helped drive people to use email addresses that they could access from any network. The easy access to free mail accounts and the permanence led people to adopt those addresses as their primary address.
When people changed addresses, for whatever reason, they didn’t have to stop paying. There was no way to tell the free ISPs to stop accepting mail for that address. Free mail providers would let addresses linger for months or years after the user had stopped logging in. Sometimes those addresses would fill up and start bouncing email, but they were not often turned off by the ISPs.
The lack of purging of abandoned addresses was the start of dead addresses accumulating on mailing lists. But there weren’t that many addresses in this state, and eventually they would fill up with mail. When they were full the ISP would stop accepting new mail for that account, and the address would bounce off a mailing list.
Everything changed with the entrance of Gmail onto the scene. When Gmail launched in 2004 they were providing a whole GB of storage for email accounts a totally unheard of storage capacity. Within a year they were providing multiple gigabytes of storage. Other freemail systems followed Gmail’s lead and now all free accounts have nearly unlimited storage. Plus, any mail in the spam folder was purged after a few weeks and bulk mail doesn’t count against the users’ storage quota. Now, an abandoned email account will almost never fill up thus senders can’t use over quota bounces to identify abandoned accounts.
Now we’re stuck in a situation where SMTP replies can’t be used to identify that there is no one home inside a particular email account. Senders can’t distinguish between a quiet subscriber and an abandoned address. ISPs, however, can and are using zombie addresses as a measure of a senders reputation.
On Monday we’ll talk about why and how zombie addresses can affect delivery. (Zombie emails: part 3)
Tuesday, we’ll talk about strategies to protect your list from being taken over by zombies. (Zombie Apocalypse)

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Is your data secure?

Not just secure from outside forces, but also secure from employees?
In a recent survey published by Help Net Security, approximately half of all employees said they would take data, including customer data, when leaving a job.
This has major implications for ESPs, where employees have access to customer data and mailing lists. There are at least 2 cases that I am aware of where employees have walked out of a company with customer mailing lists, and I’m sure there are other incidents.
ESPs should take action to prevent employees from stealing customer data.

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Email and politics

I occasionally consult for activists using email. Their needs and requirements are a little different from email marketers. Sure, the requirements for email delivery are the same: relevant and engaging mail to people who requested it. But there are complicating issues that most marketers don’t necessarily have to deal with.
Activist groups are attractive targets for forged signups. Think about it, when people get deeply involved in arguments on the internet, they often look for ways to harass the person on the other end of the disagreement. They will often signup the people they’re disagreeing with for mailing lists. When the disagreements are political, the logical target is a group on the other side of the political divide.
People also sign up spamtraps and bad addresses as a way to cause problems or harass the political group itself. Often this results in the activist group getting blocked. This never ends well, as instead of fixing the problem, the group goes yelling about how their voice is being silenced and their politics are being censored!!
No, they’re not being silenced, they’re running an open mailing list and a lot of people are on it who never asked to be on it. They’re complaining and the mail is getting blocked.
With that as background, I noticed one of the major political blogs announced their brand new mailing list today. Based on their announcement it seemed they that they may have talked to someone who knew about managing a mailing list.

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