Bring home the Bacn

You know that bunch of email addresses you cull from your customer emailing database every six months or so because they haven’t responded for a certain period of time? Don’t be hasty because those contacts may not be as dead as you think.

by Helen Leggatt

Just because you haven’t heard a peep out of certain consumers for six months to a year doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t lurking in the background. That’s according to Dela Quist, CEO of UK-basesd Alchemy Worx, (via e-consultancy) whose recent article, “Email Marketing: Making Bacn not Spam” might just change your opinion of who to cull and when.

Dela found that an average of 40 percent of subscribers, across a variety of lists, did not open any email messages sent to them for over six months to a year. Instead of dismissing this group as “emotionally unsubscribed”, in that they can’t be bothered to go through the unsubscribe process, Dela instead argues that many may well be “unemotionally subscribed”.

In other words, those subscribers still want to receive the email messages but they’re not in a position to take up that offer “today” and subsequently differentiate that message as Bacn and not spam.

Of course, it’s a balancing act and there will always be those on your list who, despite having opted-in, insist on flagging your messages as spam, so it’s worth segmenting an inactive file and perhaps giving them the opportunity to re-subscribe or be dropped from the mailing list.

“If mailers did an analysis of those who unsubscribe or those who report them as spammers, they would find that a very large percentage of them are coming from that inactive file,” said Michelle Eichner, COO and vice president of client services for e-mail deliverability consultancy Pivotal Veracity. “A couple of our clients did that analysis and they found that at the 31-month inactive mark, 43% of their spam complaints came from them. Eventually [mailing to inactive names] will lead to spam complaints.”