Data hygiene

I talk about data hygiene with clients a lot. In my experience, poor data hygiene is the number one reason that legitimate, permission based marketing ends up in the junk folder. Too many marketers don’t remove abandoned addresses from their mailing lists. As the abandoned addresses build up, eventually the list accumulates enough zombie addresses that it looks similar to a spammer’s list.
I’ve talked in depth about zombie accounts previously (part 1, part 2, part 3, apocalypse) and they talk a lot more about why we have zombies accounts and why they’re just starting to be a bigger issue for marketers. Not only are we just starting to hit critical mass with zombie accounts, but ISPs are really starting to weigh engagement in their delivery decisions. Zombie accounts are not engaged with mail. Heck, they’re not even engaged with their own email addresses.
Many marketers, though, hate the idea of data hygiene. They hate thinking about losing a potential customer. They can show me numbers that say someone didn’t open an email for 18 months and then spent hundreds of dollars on a purchase. Or they can tell me that 10% of their revenue came from people who hadn’t opened an email in more than 12 months.
I don’t want to take those subscribers away from you, the ones who are engaged with your brand or your mail in some un-trackable way. But I do want to stop the zombies from eating your delivery.

Gathering data at subscription time
Data hygiene and bouncing zombies

Related Posts

Zombie email: Part 3

Last week, in Zombie email: part 1 and part 2 I talked a little about the history of email addresses and how changes in the ISP industry in the early to mid 2000’s brought about the rise of zombie email addresses. Today we’ll look at the effect zombie addresses have on email stats and why ISPs are starting to monitor zombie addresses.
A zombie address, despite the fervent belief of some email marketers, doesn’t come back to life. The person who initially registered that address has decided to stop using that email address.  The defining factor of a zombie address is that there isn’t now and won’t be anyone in the future reading email sent to that address. There is no human there to read or react to any email sent to that address.
A zombie address does not represent an actual recipient, they’re just remnants of a recipient that once was present.
Having a list containing any significant number of zombie addresses can throw off metrics enough to mislead a sender about the effectiveness of their email marketing program. Sometimes, the zombie addresses make the metrics look worse, sometimes they make metrics look better. In either case, the metrics don’t accurately represent the performance of a marketing program.
Zombie email addresses do bulk out a mailing list, making lists look bigger. They’re not real addresses, so they don’t reflect quality, but they do impress marketers that think bigger is always better. But, in reality, you may as well add thousands of addresses at non-existent domains for the real value these addresses bring to your list.
Zombie email addresses on a list depresses any metric that use “number of emails sent” or “number of emails accepted” as a denominator.  If 10% of a list is zombie addresses, then an open rate reported as 15% will actually be an open rate of 16.7%. The more zombie addresses on a list, the more the statistics will be depressed.
In addition to having lower open rates, lists with more zombie addresses also have a lower complaint rate. In fact, in the recent past spammers have padded their lists with zombie addresses as a way to artificially lower their complaint rates.
Spammers using addresses created just to bulk up the denominator and lower complaint rates have led ISPs to start monitoring the types of addresses on a particular list. I first heard about ISPs looking at recipient profiles at a meeting in 2006, so it is not, in any way, a new technique for ISPs. What is new is the number of zombie addresses on legitimate, well maintained lists, and the fact that they are present in high enough volume to affect reputation and delivery.
ISPs use zombie addresses to monitor the reputation of a sender because it is a more accurate way to measure what the recipients think about an email and that sender. Senders ignore zombie addresses because they make some stats look bigger (total list size) and better (lower complaint rates). Many senders also believe that addresses come back to life, despite all evidence to the contrary, and will not purge an address for any reason other than it bounces. They’d rather live with inaccurate and misleading metrics than removing non-performing addresses.
Tomorrow, in the final post of this series, we’ll examine how senders can identify potential zombie addresses and what steps they can take protect themselves from the negative reputation hit from zombie addresses. (Zombie Apocalypse)

Read More

Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

Read More

Nothing is forever, even email

Yesterday I talked about how important it was to send welcome messages when you discover old email addresses. Today on the Return Path Blog, Tami Monahan Foreman shares an example email that does just that, but not as well as one might hope.

Read More