Zombies are real but less of a problem

A few years ago I wrote a series of blog posts about zombie email addresses. Zombie addresses are those that someone owned and used and interacted with, but for whatever reason stopped logging into and checking. This series started with the time before the zombies, and moved on to the zombie uprising. Then discussed how they don’t eat brains, but they do love to take a bite out of deliverability. Smart marketers, however, can defeat zombies by the judicious application of the double tap.
portrait of a Zombie computer maniac looking camera from side
Since that series of blog posts a few things have changed. The biggest thing is that the webmail providers are being much more aggressive about disabling email reception at addresses where folks don’t log in. I have a few addresses on different providers I use for testing purposes. I have to remember, though, that I need to log into them before sending test messages. If I don’t, they generally bounce.
This doesn’t completely remove the challenge of zombie addresses but it does make it easier for regular senders to purge their lists of zombies just through their normal bounce handling. No double-taps needed.

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Broken record…

The Return Path In the Know blog listed 4 reasons mailing those old addresses is a bad idea.
Ashley, the author, is completely right and I endorse everything she said. (Although I’d really like to hear what happened to the customer that added back all those addresses. What was the effect on that campaign and future email marketing?) As I was reading the article though, I realized how many times this has been said and how depressing it is that we have to say it again. And again. And again.
A number of folks have told me that the reason they don’t pay any attention to delivery professionals is because we don’t provide enough real data. They can show that sending mail to old addresses costs them nothing, and makes them real money.
That’s not really true, though. We do provide data, they just don’t like it so they don’t listen to it. Return Path publishes lots of numbers showing that mailing unengaged recipients lowers overall delivery. I can provide case studies and data but companies that are committed to sending as much mail as possible throw up many reasons why our data isn’t good or valid.
The biggest argument is that they want hard numbers. I do understand this. Numbers are great. Direct and clear answers are wonderful. But delivery is a squishy science. There are a lot of inputs and a lot of modifiers and sometimes we can’t get exactly one answer. The data is noisy, and difficult to replicate. One of the reasons is that filtering is a moving target. Filters are not, and cannot be, fixed. They are adaptive and are changing even between one hour and the next.
Delivery experts are about risk management. They are the parents requiring everyone in the car wear seat belts, even though the driver has never had an accident. They are the fire department enforcing fire codes, even though it’s the rainy season.
Risk management isn’t about the idea that bad things will absolutely happen but rather that it is more likely that a bad thing will happen in some cases.
In this case, it’s more likely that delivery problems will happen when mailing old addresses. And if those addresses aren’t actively contributing to revenue, it’s hard to argue that their presence on a list is more beneficial than their absence.
But I repeat myself. Again.

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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.

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Delivery implications of Yahoo releasing usernames

Yahoo announced a few weeks ago it would be releasing account names back into the general pool. This, understandably, caused a lot of concern among marketers about how this would affect email delivery at Yahoo. I had the opportunity to talk with a Yahoo employee last week, and ask some questions about how this might affect delivery.
Q: How many email addresses are affected?

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