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Does Size Matter?

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2009

Size matters in marketing, the bigger the email list the more sales I make, right? Wrong.

What if 10% of your list were completely uninterested in your product, what if they signed up in error, or have been on your database for 5 years receiving email after email for a service that’s no longer relevant.

If you could weed out that 10% of your database, and save 10% of your digital marketing budget, what would you do with it?

Cost saving aside, there are some other reasons why you should be taking people off your database, let's look at some examples.

Hard bounces

People move companies, retire, change ISPs or die; email accounts from time to time become redundant. When this happens at an ISP they reclaim your inbox (after about 3 months of inactivity) and sometimes turn your email account into a trap head (after about 1 year of inactivity). These old email boxes are left open and sometimes the addresses are published on the internet in the hope they will attracts spammers who harvest addresses online. When an email hits that inbox, the ISP marks it as spam and will often blacklist the sender. Now don’t panic, this doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen over a 12 month period, so if you consistently have hard bounces on your report, make sure you have set up rules to suppress them from your list. This should remove about 4% of your database per year.

Soft bounces

Bounces are categorised by the code we receive from the recipient’s mail server. Sometimes IT departments set things up incorrectly so you could be getting the message that the bounce you have is soft, when in fact it’s hard. If you get a soft bounce from an address more than 5 times over a quarter it’s likely you should remove that person as they are returning the wrong message.

No opens

So you have used our data mining tool to find all those who haven’t opened an email in the last 6 months and you want to suppress these people from your list? Don’t! If someone doesn’t download images they won’t be tracked in the open report, so if your email design is good then people might not need to download images, or if they are receiving a plain text version then they won’t show up on the open report. Take all those who haven’t opened an email in the last year, cross reference it against anyone who has clicked on an email in the last year. Remove anyone who hasn’t opened but has clicked the email. This will give you a better picture of those who are not engaged. Time to suppress them yet? No. Give them one last chance. Some of them might be waiting for the right time to buy, why not give them a 5% discount on a product or service and see if they bite, why not send a subject line telling them that their account will be closed. You’re not making any money from this part of your database, so giving them a big incentive could pull in some revenue that you wouldn’t otherwise have or rekindle an old relationship. If they don’t respond to a couple of email prompts like that then maybe it’s time to remove them and concentrate your time, energy and budget on the section of your database who are engaged.