Cleaning old lists

There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside to mailing old addresses.

A long time ago I wrote 5 answers you need before mailing old addresses, which covers a lot of the underlying things to consider first. What it doesn’t do is talk about how to mail them. Management will know all those things and still decide that sending to old addresses is a good idea.

So, now what?

A lot of folks just run the list through a data hygiene service. But, to my mind, most data hygiene services don’t address the big issue. The biggest delivery issue is not hitting spamtraps or sending to dead addresses. The biggest problem is that the folks at those addresses are going to react to the mail in ways that tells the machine learning filters that the mail is unwanted and unasked for.

Yes, these are your former customers. But they’ve not come back to your site or bought something in 3, 4, 5 years. Are they really still a customer? Maybe they’ve moved on and have no need of your product any longer. Maybe their financial situation has drastically changed. Maybe they are going to be upset about hearing from you because they bought something from you for a loved one who is now gone. You don’t know.

Data hygiene will remove bad addresses and some will even give you insights into who is currently interacting with mail in their inbox. But they can’t tell you that this customer is interested in your mail. They can’t tell you which of the people who bought from you 6 years ago are going to report your mail as spam. If enough of those recipients hit the this is spam button, that will hurt your reputation and may affect your delivery no matter how low your bounces are.

When I work with clients to clean data up, it’s a process of figuring out the business tolerance for risk, the underlying health of the overall data acquisition process through the years and what we’re going to do with the addresses going forward. If it’s an internal initiative it’s a little different than if it’s externally driven (ie, our delivery is in the toilet or we’re listed on Spamhaus… or whatever) as well.

For folks that are trying to figure this out on their own here are my general recommendations.

  • Determine what your business goals for this deep dive into the data base are.
    • do you want to identify addresses still live and in use?
    • do you want to identify customers who may be interested in making an additional purchase?
    • do you have some other goal?
  • Create an actual campaign tailored to that goal.
    • if you want a sign of life, make it simple to react
    • if you want additional purchases, make it a superb deal
  • Start slow. Don’t mail all 30 million addresses in one day.
  • Work your way backwards through your database. Start with the more recent data and increment backwards to older and older data.
  • Track. Track. Track. Track your delivery stats, engagement stats, everything.

A few dos and don’ts for good measure

  • Do not just grab addresses and add the addresses to an existing mail stream. Be polite, introduce yourself again.
  • Do not rush the process. These addresses are not currently bringing you any revenue, and there is no hurry.
  • Do aggressively monitor all delivery for all your mail. You may start to see problems in your more active users before you can see changes in the stats for the new campaigns.
  • Do be prepared to adjust strategy based on the age of the list. What works for addresses 4 years old may not be the right strategy for addresses 6 years old.
  • Do respect your older customer. Remind them who you are and their interactions.
  • Do invite them to join your current mailing list.
  • Do limit the number of emails you send to any address.

Experience tells us that most of the addresses won’t come back. But you will get a few customers returning. The occasional dip into older addresses may win back some recipients and if done carefully and thoughtfully won’t necessarily cause long term delivery problems.

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There are no “tricks” to getting to the inbox. There used to be some tricks. But the ISPs figured them out and protect against them.

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Data verification is so important. So very, very important. We’ve gone beyond the point where any big sender should just believe that the addresses users give them are accurate. They need to do it for their own business reasons and they need to do it to prevent incorrect PII from being leaked and shared.

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Data hygiene and bouncing zombies

There are a number of folks who tell me there can be no zombie addresses on their lists, they aggressively remove any address that bounces. The problem is that zombie addresses don’t bounce, at least not always. And even when ISPs say they have a policy to bounce email after a certain period of time with no access, that’s not always put into practice.
How do I know that ISPs don’t always deactivate addresses on the schedules they publish? Because I have seen addresses not be deactivated.
I have addresses in a lot of places that I go for long periods of time not checking. It’s rare that they’re taken from me or reject mail – most of the time they’re special test addresses I use when diagnosing issues. This post is based on my experiences with those addresses and how abandoned addresses are treated at some ISPs.
For Gmail I have two examples of addresses not being deactivated.
In July 2011, we set up a test address to look at how Gmail was handling authentication. We sent a matrix of different test emails to it, with valid and invalid SPF and DKIM signatures. We pulled the data from the account. I don’t know for certain when the last time I logged in, but it was August or September of last year. So we have an address that has been dormant since September 2011.
I just sent mail to the account and google happily accepted it.
Mar  2 07:03:22 misc postfix/smtp[11770]: 11CA12DED3: to=<wttwtestacct@gmail.com>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.127.27]:25, delay=1.8, delays=0.25/0.02/0.56/0.93, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1330700602 x8si8608852pbi.66)
I have another google account (apparently) that my records show I set up sometime in 2010. The login info was saved October 2010. I don’t know when the last time I logged in was, but given I’d forgotten the existence of the account it’s a good bet that it has been more than a year. That account is also accepting mail as of today.
Mar  2 07:06:25 misc postfix/smtp[11836]: 8D90C2DED3: to=<phphendrie@gmail.com>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.127.27]:25, delay=1.6, delays=0.26/0.02/0.68/0.66, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1330700785 a8si4075740icw.96)
For Hotmail I also have quite a bit of history and information. I signed up for my first Hotmail account in 1997. That was an account I used the address to post to usenet, but I didn’t actually use it for mail. I’d check it occasionally (usually when someone said in the newsgroup that they were going to email me) but it wasn’t an address I used regularly. As I moved from posting regularly in usenet, I started checking that account even less.
For a while, if I went more than 6 months checking my Hotmail account they would make me “re-claim” it. What would happen when I’d log in is I’d get a message along the lines of “well, we disabled this account due to inactivity, do you want it back?” I’d say yes, have to go through the setup process again and it would be my account. Mail was deleted during the disabling, and I am guessing they rejected anything new going to that account. I went through this dance for 4 or 5 years. I even had my calendar set to remind me to login every 6 months or so. There was some sentimental value to the address that kept me logging in. I have that same username at every major free ISP: Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL, so it’s “my” address.
About 6 or 7 years ago, that behavior changed. I stopped getting the request to reclaim my account. Instead I could just log in. I’d still have mail (mostly spam as the address is on *lots* of lists and millions CDs). I still check it irregularly. I don’t have any idea when the last time I checked it was, but I think it’s been since at least November and probably longer back than that. Hotmail is still accepting mail for that address as well.
It’s anecdotal evidence, at best, but it ‘s the type of evidence that is acceptable even when it’s anecdotal. There are some addresses that are abandoned for long periods of time at the free mailbox providers and they’re are not all automatically pulled from the ranks of active addresses.
What does this mean for senders? It means that data hygiene has to go beyond just removing addresses that bounce. ISPs are not disabling addresses consistently enough for marketers to be able to trust that all addresses on their list are active just because they are accepting email.
This is the root of the recommendation to put in a hygiene program, this is why senders need to look at who is actually engaged with their brand and make some hard decisions about shooting zombies in the head.

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