Dead addresses tell us things

There was confirmation this week that the increase in “user unknown” messages from Yahoo is actually Yahoo cleaning out abandoned accounts. At the same time a Yahoo is sending out notifications to folks to log into mail.

The first thing every sender should do is remove all these Yahoo addresses from their lists. They’re done, kaput. Gone.

There are some other things worth doing with them, though. Some of these things are informative, they will help help you understand your subscribers and list lifecycle better. Others are protective, they will improve your data hygiene over the long term.

We know that Yahoo disabled a bunch of email addresses that have not been in use for at least a year. There are some other bits of information we have that give us a broader picture of what is happening.

  1. About a year ago, this same thing happened. There was an increase in the number of user unknowns at Yahoo (Thanks, Tara, for noticing I wrote about it last year). It’s possible that they’re scheduling address purges on a yearly basis.
  2. I mentioned reports of an increase in user unknowns from Yahoo in April 2013.
  3. Yahoo is sending mail to users alerting them that if they don’t log into their mail accounts they’ll lose access to mail – I got one of these to the address tied to my flickr account.

Based on this information, I presuppose the following.

  1. Yahoo has an process for reviewing and disabling accounts that happens in the early spring and has done for at least 5 years.
  2. The addresses that started bouncing recently are accounts that have been not logged into for between 12 and 23 months. 12 because this is what the re-engagement campaigns are indicating. 23 because we can assume that some addresses were at 11 months for the disabling a year ago.

We have a known population of yahoo.com addresses that we can assume were abandoned between April 2017 and March 2018. Now you know how many Yahoo addresses go bad in a 11 – 12 month period.

We can ask questions about those addresses that will give us more insight into our subscriber list and how we should handle expiring addresses and data hygiene.

  1. When did those addresses join your list?
  2. When was the last open? click?
  3. Is that address associated with an active login or purchasing account?

With a known population of freemail addresses and some certainty on when the recipients stopped logging into their accounts we can develop data hygiene rules that make sense for our business. It’s not just picking a certain period of time to stop mailing. We can model the behaviour of freemail users knowing when they abandoned their accounts and make sensible policies.

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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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Thoughts on Data Hygiene

zombieemailOne of the big deliverability vs. marketing arguments has to do with data hygiene and dropping inactive users. Marketers hate that deliverability people tell them to let subscribers go after a long time of no activity from the subscriber.
Data hygiene is good. Email is not permanent and not forever, and the requirements for data hygiene in the email space are very different than the requirements in the postal mail space. There is no such thing as “dear occupant” in email. I mean, you can sent to occupant, but the occupant can then hit the this is spam button. Too many emails to “occupant” and mail goes to bulk instead of the inbox. These are real risks.
With that being said, there are a lot of things to consider when putting together a data hygiene program. You’re looking to remove people who are no longer interested in your brand as much as they are no longer interested in your mail. You’re trying to suss out who might have abandoned the email address you have for them. It’s complicated.
I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years to implement data hygiene programs. Sometimes those programs were to deal with a bulk foldering issue. Other times clients have been trying to address a SBL listing. Still other clients were just looking for better control over their email and delivery. In all cases, my goal is to identify and classify their recipients into 3 groups: addresses we know are good, addresses we know are bad, and then addresses we don’t know about.
Good addresses get mailed. Bad addresses get dumped. The challenging bit is what do we do with the unknown addresses? That’s when we start looking at other data the client may have. Purchases? Website visits? What do we have to work with and what else do we know about the people behind the addresses. Once we’ve looked at the data we design a program to take the addresses we don’t know about and drop them into either the good or the bad bucket. How we do that really depends on the specifics of the company, their program and their data. But we’ve had good success overall.
There’s been a lot of discussion on hygiene this week, after Mailchimp published a blog post looking at the value of inactive subscribers. They found something that I don’t find very surprising, based on my observations across hundreds of clients over the years.

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OATH and Microsoft updates

I’ve seen multiple people asking questions about what’s going to happen with the Yahoo and AOL FBLs after the transition to the new Oath infrastructure. The most current information we have says that the AOL FBL (IP based) is going away. This FBL is handled by the AOL infrastructure. As AOL users are moved to the new infrastructure any complaints based on their actions will come through the Yahoo complaint feedback loop (CFL). The Yahoo CFL is domain based. Anyone who has not signed up for the Yahoo CFL should do so.
When registering you will need each domain and the selectors you’re planning on using. Yahoo will send an email with a confirmation link that needs to be clicked on within a short period of time in order to activate the FBL.
Microsoft’s SNDS program had an outage at the end of last week. That’s been fixed, but the missing data will not be back populated into the system. This has happened a couple times in the past. It seems the system gets a live feed of data. If, for some reason, the data is interrupted, then it’s gone and doesn’t get populated.

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