Related Posts

The rules of delivery success

Senders with delivery problems ask about “the rules.” “Just tell us what the rules are!” “If the ISPs would just tell us what to do we’d do it!” There is only one rule anyone needs to pay attention to for good mail delivery: Respect the recipient.
Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.
The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.

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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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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.

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