Real Magnet Insights

Chris Arrendale Joins EEC Deliverability & Compliance Roundtable

January 27th, 2012 by MikeMay

Chris Arrendale, Real Magnet’s Senior Director of Deliverability & ISP Relations, covers for our clients some of the bigger deliverability issues right here on the blog, and also on Twitter at @Arrendale. And now he is expanding his deliverability purview industry-wide as an invited member of the Email Experience Council’s Deliverability & Compliance Roundtable.

Chris’ role on the roundtable is not unlike what we task him with here – act as a liaison between the sending and receiving community with the aim of keeping the lines of communication open and working towards standards that make email work better for all of us. The difference is that the EEC helps amplify senders’ voices by expressing concerns with the collective weight of many organizations. Chris’ role also includes Real Magnet in standard-setting conversations from the very outset, giving us – and our clients – greater visibility into the trends shaping email, and how they will impact our day-to-day lives as email marketers.

The Roundtable doesn’t just meet and talk, however. Every year they produce a new research report or whitepaper on the issue they’ve identified as central to email deliverability and compliance. Previous reports include “How to Revive a Stale Email List,” “The Deliverability Resource Guide,” and “The State of Email Metrics.”

The Roundtable meets every third Thursday. We expect a full report, Chris.

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Learning What to Learn from Email + Social

January 26th, 2012 by MikeMay

I had a boss once who introduced me to the phrase, “in position to be in position.” He would use it to mean we had made enough headway on an initiative to almost be ready to see some results. It would be nice if all initiatives in business worked like a light switch, and you could just switch them on and they’d go. The reality though is that most initiatives – whether they’re a product launch or a marketing promotion or a new business partnership – have a discovery period that you enter with a hypothesis, but one you should be prepared to modify if your initial assumptions don’t bear out. In my experience, I’ve found myself “in position to be in position” after this period, where I have some conviction in my hypotheses and can start to execute on the strategy.

Now that we’ve started using and testing Social Magnet, we’re in position to be in position to learn a lot about email + social. Combining email and social in the ways Social Magnet allows is all new, and I don’t yet know what we’ll learn. In fact, we’re in the stage of learning what we’ll be able to learn – another version of being in position to be in position. Here are some of the assumptions we have going into this process, what we’re testing, and what we hope to learn:

Impact of social media on email results: One of our assumptions is that there is a lot of crossover between the email and social audiences of many companies, particularly in the B-to-B space. If that’s the case, then messaging in all channels increases frequency among the people who are attentive in all channels. So what happens when the same message is promoted across email and social? Will social messages lift email results from the added frequency? Or will the results from social cannibalize the results from email if they reach the audience first? We ran a test earlier this week promoting a webinar to see. We ran an A/B test of the email list, mailing to the first half before we promoted the same link on Facebook and Twitter, and then mailing to the other half after the social messaging. We saw a difference, but not one that was statistically relevant. Not yet anyway – if we see the same small difference over the next 4 or 5 tests, we might be onto something. Or we might have to revise our assumptions. Or our results may change as our list and audience sizes change (our email list is significantly larger than our social audience currently). As you can imagine, there are a ton of variables that can’t be isolated for a perfect testing environment. So for now, we’re not testing our results as much as testing our tests.

Impact of email on social media results: Social Magnet allows us to measure the number of clicks and (if we’re using Real Magnet’s events module for registrations) even conversions that come from all of our channels. Just as social messaging may impact email’s results, it’s equally likely that people who see something in their inbox may be more inclined to act on a message from the same brand on Facebook or Twitter. It’s plausible, at least. So we’re looking at ways to test that, and see if we can identify some situations where email messages that may not drive inbox engagement still lift results measurably in other channels. Intuitively, it makes sense. It’s only now that we’ve had a tool to put some serious thought into how to measure it.

Performance of different message types by channel: Like most marketers, we promote everything in all our channels. If something goes onto the blog, it may also show up in an email newsletter, on Facebook, Twitter and in LinkedIn. Some of what we do I’d classify as informational – like this blog, for example, or Tuesday’s blog about Subject Lines, or Chris’ blog earlier this week about Deliverability Numbers. Other messages are promotional or direct response, like a webinar registration reminder or a whitepaper download for lead generation. In Social Magnet, you can categorize any message – email, Twitter, Facebook and soon LinkedIn. It works very similar to a blog, where you determine what content categories you would like to group messages within, and then simply select one when you publish your message. We currently have a number of informational message categories, including Blogs (where we measure how much lift our own blogs get from our social channels), Articles (similar to Blogs, but measuring the clicks to articles we publish or are quoted in such as MediaPost and Mobile Marketer), Images (used to measure the pickup of any kind of images we post, principally socially) and Pass-Along (where we group any social messages that pass along links to articles that have nothing to do with us, but which we find interesting or influential enough to share). We have another category for Webinars on the promotional side, and one more for Newsletters. Once we have enough data, we might have some insight about which channels are best for different message types. It could be some highly actionable learning, as marketers could then fine-tune their messaging by content, improving targeting by channel while at the same time reducing clutter by limiting messages to the channel they perform best in.

You’ll notice I haven’t once said “best practices” in this whole piece. My hypothesis does not allow for them. I don’t expect to find any universal truths about combining email and social, and fully expect that what I learn is only partly applicable to other marketers. Instead, what I hope to learn – and share – is the process by which we’re discovering what works for us. The findings may not be replicable from one company to the next, but learning what you can learn from email and social is something that we can all do.

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A Tale of Two Subject Lines

January 24th, 2012 by MikeMay

Dickens may very well have looked at the results of his A/B testing and declared, “It was the best of subject lines; it was the worst of subject lines.” Trying out different subject lines is a quick and powerful way to boost campaign performance by a few percentage points. But there is another consideration for subject lines besides direct response impact. The subject line – being the first and often only part of a message your subscribers see in the inbox – carries a significant branding impact as well. The words you choose can influence open rate among the 10% – 20% or so who go on to read the email, but also leave an impression on the 80% – 90% who do not open and read the message. When you choose a subject line, consider not only what action you want your subscribers to take, but also how the subject line can help tell your brand’s story among your entire subscriber base.

Here are some comparisons of actual subject lines in my inbox. Each pair is for the same type of message, but the brand narrative they tell is very different. Have a look:

The Confirmation Email:
Emails to subscribers or customers right after they have made a purchase or filled out a form on your site reach them when they are at their most engaged and receptive, so the confirmation email is critical for setting the tone of your brand’s relationship with them.

Backcountry.com: “Order Confirmed – Get Stoked”
CustomInk.com: “Shipping Confirmation – Order #1857244″

Both examples do the job, but convey a very different impression of the brand. The language in the Backcountry subject line is echoed by the copy on the website, so the tone remains consistent. CustomInk.com also has a casual tone on the site, but elects to be all business with the confirmation subject line. Neither is right or wrong, but they tell different stories about the brands sending them.

The Last Chance Email
Email remains a staple in marketing communications in part because of its immediacy. Over half the response to most messages come within the first three hours, and nearly all of its impact is recognized within the first day. It’s no wonder then that “last chance” is a popular theme for email messages. But the way the “last minute” message is presented can mean the difference between inciting a shopper to frenzy, or bringing her down from one.

Container Store: “SPECTACULAR last-minute gifts, many on SALE now!”
CompactAppliance.com: “Last minute gift ideas with guaranteed 24 hour shipping”

Both brands offer to solve the same problem, but offer to ally themselves differently. Container Store is the coach giving the rousing halftime speech: “Let’s do this!” CompactAppliance.com on the other hand, is more tranquilo, reassuring shoppers, “Relax, you can do this.”

The Newsletter
On the one hand, we want to telegraph the scheduled consistency of our newsletters in order to build familiarity and anticipation within the inbox. But we can also use the newsletter subject line to glimpse some brand personality, if that’s appropriate.

Edgemoor Daycare Center: “Newsletter November 23, 2011″
Neuvation Cycling: “Newsletter December 16, Spoke Sniffers Club”

The difference between these two approaches is due in part to the relationship each brand has with its subscribers. Most of Edgemoor Daycare Center’s subscribers are the parents of young children who attend the center – as captive an audience as an email marketer can hope for. Neuvation sells cycling products so its newsletters are direct response pieces designed to drive transactions. But the other difference is based on the attentiveness each brand gives to its subject line. Neuvation customizes its subject line for the content within. Yes, it is designed to drive higher open rates, but it also suggests that the brand is willing to go a little further in order to be relevant and engaging to its audience. Taking the easy way out with a subject line can imply to your subscribers that you do not value them enough to put in that extra bit of attentiveness.

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Email Deliverability Numbers from 2011

January 20th, 2012 by Chris Arrendale

I have to admit, I was really impressed with the figures in the article “Internet 2011 in numbers” (http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/01/17/internet-2011-in-numbers/). Of course, I paid close attention to the email numbers, but the other trends they discuss in mobile, social media, and domain names were also fascinating. Here’s the list that caught my attention:

3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
$44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

I’m not going to go into all the numbers and trends, but some of the items caught my eye and I wanted to dig deeper into them. Symantec reports that in November 2011, spam accounted for almost 71% of email traffic (down 3.7% from October 2011). If you couple that with the article’s number of 19% of spam emails are delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters, spam can cause companies a lot of money in storage and lost productivity. Email marketers need to continue delivering relevant content to engaged subscribers to get into their subscriber’s inbox. I would also venture to take that a step further and make sure that email marketers are paying attention to their IP and domain reputation to make sure that they stay out of these email filters.

I also found it noteworthy to mention that the article stated Hotmail was the largest email service in the world with over 360 million users. Hotmail (which also includes msn.com and live.com domains) has come a long way in the past 15 years. With the new “Sweep” feature, SkyDrive integration, and ActiveViews, I can see why Hotmail is growing. As someone in the deliverability space, I use Hotmail’s Smart Network Data Services portal (https://postmaster.live.com/snds/) on a daily basis to keep track of how my customers are performing at the Microsoft domains. The tools that Microsoft provides to the email world has made a difference in many customer conference calls concerning email deliverability.

The last point that I want to mention is the article states that there are 3.146 billion email accounts worldwide. That is an astonishing figure to me considering the first email was sent almost 40 years ago! I have seen figures where that number is expected to grow over 4 billion by 2015. As an email marketer, it is so important to remember that your list hygiene and data security practices are high priority. Continually segmenting your list and removing those inactive accounts will help with your email delivery.

Who says that email is dying? Stay relevant, stay engaged, and get delivered!

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Getting Our Smart On in LinkedIn “Email + Social” Group

January 19th, 2012 by MikeMay

I’ve been in the email business since 1997. I think it’s near impossible to do anything for 15 years and not get bored. I’ve managed to stay engaged with email for that long because every 2-3 years, something big changes within the industry, causing all us email marketers to find new ways to keep our metrics humming and ROI high.

Social media is responsible for not one, nor two, but now three of the big shifts in email marketing, thusly:

1. Social Media as a Threat to email (2009 – 2010): A few years ago, the rapid rise of Facebook and Twitter prompted quite a few people close to social media to pronounce the imminent demise of email marketing. Very few people who actually used and relied on email joined the chorus, however. But we devoted no small amount of energy towards reassuring email marketers that all of their email skills and permission-based assets were as valuable as ever. Because they were, and they still are.

2. Email coexists with Social Media (2011): Once it was clear the sky was in no danger of falling, the email + social conversation shifted from how social would marginalize email to how email and social could c0-exist, perhaps even symbiotically. Share-With-Your-Network (SWYN) features were launched and at least one article per week in industry trades was on how to use email to improve social, and/or vice versa. The biggest distinction between this period and the fear, uncertainty and doubt that preceded it is that the prevailing sentiment here was based on sound strategy instead of Chicken Little sensationalism, and has proven to be largely true. My own personal take is that email and social are both permission-based channels, so the skills for success in them spring from the same strategy. I believe email marketers are uniquely qualified to succeed in social, so adopting a channel agnostic attitude for communications can benefit us significantly.

3. Email + Social Integration (2012): Here’s where we are today – looking for new ways for email and social not just to lift each other, but to work together in ways that produce all new insights and intelligence for marketers. If I knew what they all were already my job would be really easy – but also kind of boring. The truth is that none of us know what we’ll learn from analytics that measure the productivity of each channel within marketing communications. Will we learn that tweeting right before an email goes out lifts open rates? Or maybe that the net clicks from a campaign are actually higher if the email goes first followed by tweets? How will we optimize communications across channels for the maximum response? Is the ROI on growing our social audiences higher than growing our house list?

Like I said, I don’t know the answers to those questions, and dozens more we can now start to ask about integrated digital communications. But we aim to find the answers, which really means finding the ways each of us individually can answer them for our own organizations. One of the ways we’ll be doing that is by sharing everything we discover on the new LinkedIn Email + Social group we started. Whether your job depends on integrating digital communications or you’re just a curious lurker, I encourage you to join the group and participate as much or little as you’d like. It’s really one of those topics that can only benefit from as much brainpower we can connect to it.

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New Study: Does Social Media Integration Come Down to Good Old ROI?

January 17th, 2012 by MikeMay

A new study by InSites Consulting on social media integration within organizations is making its rounds through the trades today. A 42-slide presentation by the researcher is up on SlideShare here, and there is a pretty comprehensive assessment over on MarketingProfs. InSite also published a short 1-page summary here. The study ends up being pretty relevant to almost any organization in the way it benchmarks social media adoption and integration across different vertical industries, B2B vs B2C, and company size. No matter who you are, you can see how you stack up to other companies like yours.

I find the report particularly interesting in the distinction it makes between social media “adoption” and “integration.” Lots of businesses already have Facebook pages (69%), corporate Twitter accounts (57%), LinkedIn pages (47%) and YouTube channels (43%). But far fewer are actively in the process of integrating social media (23%) or have already done so (14%).

The biggest obstacle cited between adoption and integration is that management sees “no clear financial benefits.” The study does point out that there is a clear correlation between organizations that are well down the social integration road and financial performance: the companies that integrate social better tend to make more money. What isn’t clear is the causality – do the companies that integrate social do better as a result of the integration, or is it that the more successful companies possess the organizational structure, culture or other attributes that make them more likely to move aggressively into social integration?

I think the answer lies in the perceived obstacle. A lot of companies – particularly in B2B – are interested in social media inasmuch as it makes the phone ring. If they can’t clearly see how Facebook generates leads, ie, they see “no clear financial benefits” to integrating social, they’re less likely channel resources away from what they know works (or at least know used to work and hope will work again one day). As we integrate Social Magnet into our internal email and social media channels, I’m particularly mindful of that perspective as it’s a question I hear pretty commonly. Why should I move money into social? What should I take it out of?

My hypothesis is that an organization that is active and successful in social media becomes more approachable, which makes prospects more likely to post a comment on Facebook, reply to a tweet, ask a question in the comments field of a blog, or even pick up the phone. I’m seeing if that hypothesis bears out in the analytics on Social Magnet. In addition to giving marketers a clear picture of their social activity, Social Magnet is unique in that its analytics compare productivity across all channels. For example, we’ll post a link to a blog post (maybe this one, in fact) on Facebook and Twitter, and also include it an an upcoming email newsletter. We’ll then be able to see which channel drove the most links, which helps paint a picture of how productive your social channels are compared to email. As a marketer, I find data like that – the kind that gives you clear conviction in your marketing decisions – pretty irresistible.

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Tweaks and Tips: Email Job Status

January 16th, 2012 by Michael Al-Megdad

We’re always looking at ways to improve the user experience on the Real Magnet interface. We’ve had feedback asking us for a quick view of the delivery status of a recently sent message. Under the Track tab you’ll see a new Job Status button in the grid.

Job Status Button

Our Job Status button will now allow you to see general metrics of where your message is in the process of being delivered (as shown in the image below). If you’re having trouble viewing the Job Status button on the track page you should clear your cache. Instructions on how to do so are here.

Job Status - Sent Job Status Overview

If you have any questions or feedback, let us know! Contact us at support@realmagnet.com or at 301-652-4025.

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Email Deliverability New Year’s Resolutions

January 13th, 2012 by Chris Arrendale

While many of us are making personal New Year’s Resolutions such as losing weight (myself included), finding a new job, or going back to school, email marketers should also be making a New Year’s Resolution concerning deliverability. A new year means a new look on your email marketing program. So, for your first email marketing meeting of the year, make sure you include these in your “resolution” checklist:

-User engagement is now more vital than ever. Depending upon your business and sending methodology, identify subscribers that have been inactive for 6-9 months, and segment them out. Removing the unengaged subscribers will help reduce complaints, improve your response rates, and help establish a stronger reputation with the ISPs.

-URL shorteners are not your friend! Many URL shorteners are listed on major blacklists and will get your emails blocked, so always use full URLs in your campaigns.

-It is time to authenticate with SPF and DKIM. If you do not have IP and domain authentication set up for your email program, resolve to get this done for 2012.

-Set up and monitor abuse@ and postmaster@ email addresses for your email sending domain. This way people can get in contact with you if they have questions. With that being said, monitor the reply email address too. Nothing is as bad as trying to reply to a brand’s email only to find out that mailbox isn’t monitored.

-Resolve to test, test, and test your email marketing campaigns. If you are a Real Magnet customer, we have deliverability tools for rendering, usability, and spam checking.

The key to success is to make sure you don’t just do all of the above once, but to continually look back at your email marketing program and make adjustments as needed. I hope your New Year is prosperous and you strive to keep all of your New Year’s Resolutions! Until 2013…

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Email+Social’s “Chuck Fruit Moment”

January 12th, 2012 by MikeMay

In my MediaPost column this week, I wrote on “Email+Social’s ‘Chuck Fruit Moment’“. We’re neck deep in integrating email and social media and over the next few months here you’ll see lots more about what we’re doing, what we’re learning and how to best use the features of Social Magnet. Our aim is to become experts on this burgeoning field so that you can become experts too.

Email+Social’s “Chuck Fruit Moment”
by Mike May
published in MediaPost’s Email Insider, 1-11-12

I was working at the Interactive Advertising Bureau a decade ago when I first heard the term “Chuck Fruit Moment.” Chuck Fruit was the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch in 1979 when he agreed to a meeting with a group of entrepreneurs set to launch the first all-sports television network: ESPN. Where others would have seen risk, Chuck Fruit saw a huge opportunity — for his brand to own all of sports. He signed a $15 million deal to be the exclusive beer sponsor with the fledgling network, a move that is credited with not only launching the venerated cable TV brand, but establishing cable TV as a legitimate advertising channel in its own right.

I can’t remember what we ultimately decided was online advertising’s Chuck Fruit Moment. It may have been in 2001 when Volvo launched a car exclusively online, or in 2002 when Frito-Lay’s Cammie Dunaway diverted budget from the Super Bowl to online ads, or in 2003 when Starcom MediaVest included online properties in its upfront. Regardless, it was not a moment we could have created ourselves. Our job instead was to help create the conditions under which such a moment could exist, and then of course get in front of the parade once it started, like a good trade association should.

We’re in a very similar position in the email industry right now. Email does not face quite the same threat of marginalization that online advertising did a decade ago, but the rise (in popularity and panache) of social media and increased inbox clutter are acting as a catalyst for change within email. The industry could move in a number of different directions, but the one that seems most likely is for email to become part of a broader digital communications platform, more tightly integrated with social, mobile and other channels.

The Chuck Fruit Moment for email will be the event that changes marketers’ perspective on the role email plays within communications strategy. It could mean recognizing that the branding or frequency impact of a subject line is as powerful as a well-crafted tweet, or that Facebook fans make the most profitable email list subscribers when tended carefully in both channels. I don’t know what event could be the actual moment, or what brand has enough sway to drive it. But in order for it to occur, there are still a number of conditions that need to be met within email:

1. Tools for the job. Already we are seeing email companies creating dashboards to monitor, analyze and even create communications for social, mobile and the inbox alike. Soon I expect we will see the social dashboards building out or partnering for email capabilities and approaching the market from the other side. In another side of the digital landscape, we have seen search marketing firms expand into Internet marketing companies, including SEO, SEM, content marketing, Google AdWords, Facebook advertising and any other tactic that aids in lead generation. Look for email to fit similarly into a suite of services organized around engagement, qualification and retention.

2. Email perceived as more digital than direct. At many companies, email is run separately from social media, SEM, PR and other channels, even those principally digital. Some organizations have “advanced” or “emerging” technologies groups that focus on social and mobile, but omit email because of its tenure, despite the rich potential for integration. Instead, email is considered a direct channel, and operated and evaluated largely within a direct marketing context. Email is direct, but that is not all it is. For email’s Chuck Fruit Moment to occur, marketers must stop asking, “How many sales of this thing can we get out of our email list, and how many more off social?” and start asking, “How can we best sell this thing using all our digital communications together?”

3. Integrated digital marketing functional expertise. Right now, there is no standard operating procedure for what marketing function controls which channel. Social is commonly in PR, but not always. Email often runs out of the catalog or events group, because they have already built familiarity with one set of metrics with which to evaluate email. But there are as many exceptions as there are rules, and you can make a case for almost any marketing function at almost any company to lay claim to email, social or mobile.

The commonality, though, is that the channels are usually managed separately because the functional expertise is typically limited to a channel. You’ve been trained in email, or she is an expert in social media, or he is our in-house mobile maven. In order for the channels to be integrated, the functional expertise of integrated digital marketing must exist. This is likely to start at smaller companies where there isn’t enough staff to support specialists in each discipline, and where enterprising marketers — armed with the right new tools — can start to experiment with integrated digital marketing.

4. Metrics and insights must contribute to tactics. Email is a channel where learning comes quickly; analytics are readily available — and with them, the institutional knowledge of how to turn insights into improved performance. For any sort of integrated marketing movement to fully succeed, the same insights-beget-improvement analytics need to exist.

I think the idea is less to make social as individually accountable as email; that won’t happen without some seriously creepy back-channel tracking taking place. Rather, marketers need to find ways to analyze, evaluate and then act on the metrics that are available across multiple channels: device, geolocation, time of day, frequency and other attributes. And the analytics must show the benefit of integrating the communications.

For example, learning that tweeting a link to a new product page drives 15% more clicks when it hits the airwaves within one hour after an accompanying email reaches inboxes would compel many retailers to look earnestly at integrated digital marketing.

5. Coinage. I’ve been saying “integrated digital marketing,” but that’s probably not the right term. Someone has to come up with it, and then someone (maybe someone else) has to make it stick.

Note that I haven’t expressly said that Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn have to do anything in particular — they don’t. The right set of features or data availability could certainly spur integrated marketing along, but the conditions that could enable email’s Chuck Fruit Moment are within our own reach.

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Taking Action on Inactive Subscribers

January 3rd, 2012 by MikeMay

I don’t normally talk about industry averages because they rarely apply to any individual company within an industry, but for illustrative purposes here I’ll make an exception. The number most commonly offered up as an industry average open rate is 20%, and industry average click-through rates are typically reported between 2% and 4%. Your results may vary of course. But given these numbers, 80% of recipients on average do not open a message, and 96% – 98% do not click on any given message. Now some of these unresponsive people were responsive last week or last month, but it turns out that for many email marketers, a sizable percentage of the non-responders are chronic, and have not opened or clicked on a message for months or even years.

These are your inactive subscribers. You know them well enough to have them on your list, and they know you well enough to not unsubscribe. But for some reason or another, they’re just not that into you anymore. Some maybe never were, filtering your messages from the very outset into a folder that receives little attention, or even signing up with an email address they never check. Since the dawn of email until very recently, we had no real incentive to do anything special with these subscribers other than continue mailing to them hoping one day to get through. The cost of each subsequent message is very low (particularly compared to the upside from a click-through) and email success is a function of absolute activity, not relative. 200 click-throughs has always been worth more to your business than 175, even if you have to mail to 10,000 more people to get there.

The landscape has changed, however, and engagement metrics are now beginning to impact deliverability. What that means is that the unresponsive people on your list are making it harder to reach the responsive people. So it’s time to take a look at who these people are, and decide what you’re going to do about them, or else risking some downward pressure on your deliverability. There are three options to consider:

1. Remove inactives from your house file
2. Move inactives to a separate group for different treatment
3. Leave inactives in your house file and treat no differently

I’ll take a look at each and provide some context that might help you make a decision.

1. Remove inactives from your house file.
Taking the unresponsive people out of your house file altogether will result in an immediate lift on your engagement metrics. For example, if 5,000 people from your 20,000 name list has not opened a message in 13 months or more (the time frame I typically start with, since some responsiveness is geared around annual events such as membership renewals, annual conferences and holidays), simply omitting them from your next mailing can boost your open and click-through rates by 33%. If you’re at industry averages, your 20% open rate that drove 4,000 opens previously will still see the same 4,000 readers, but from the 15,000 people remaining on your list. You’ve climbed to 26.7%, sacrificing no absolute results and increasing the percentage of your recipients who interact with your message. This lift in engagement metrics signals to ISPs and email administrators that you’re a legitimate sender, decreasing the likelihood that your messages will be shuffled off to junk folders or bounced – a bona fide upside across your entire email program. The downside is that there is always the risk that you’ve assumed incorrectly – that someone who appears inactive is still seeing your messages in the inbox and waiting for the one that grabs her attention. The longer someone is inactive the less likely this is the case, but it is still something to factor into your decision.

2. Move inactives to a separate group for different treatment.
This approach mitigates the downside from option 1, in that you’re not cutting inactives loose entirely. Instead, you’re targeting them like you would any other segment of your list. Only instead of sending them messages based on what they have done or bought in the past, you’re sending them messages based on what they haven’t done. One approach is a dedicated win-back campaign, where you expressly point out that you haven’t heard from them and try to re-engage in some way. Another is pare down the frequency of the messages, only sending them the ones of the greatest strategic importance. These may be the announcement that registration for the big conference is now open, or changes in content or products or features that may appeal to them and shake them back into activity. Like any kind of targeting, this approach requires a little extra effort. But you will recognize the same lift in engagement metrics on the messages they don’t receive, which will still signal to ISPs that you’re on the level and your messages deserve to pass the velvet rope.

3. Leave inactives in the house file and treat no differently.
Technically, this is the “do nothing” approach and is a viable option based on your circumstances. If your deliverability and engagement metrics are already strong, despite a significant number of inactives in your list, maintaining your status quo could be justifiable. Remember that even unread messages carry a branding impact. If you do elect to leave your inactives in place, make sure that your subject lines still speak to them and work towards re-engaging them. Telegraph your message content so that even subscribers who only glance at their unread messages still feel like they’re in the loop with your brand.

An important consideration for any of these options is where your inactive subscribers came from in the first place. People who actively subscribed to your list or made a purchase showed a significant level of engagement at one point, and are more likely to be re-engaged in the future. But if your inactives are names acquired through a channel with low engagement (such as a list of trade show attendees you exhibited at, or a purchased list), the chance of them suddenly awakening to your brand after a year of ignoring it are slim. Better to cut them loose and lift your deliverability and engagement metrics.

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