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E-mail : Operation Retention

How to keep your e-mail housefiles healthy

February 2009 By Austin C. Bliss
As a marketer, you work hard every day to grow your e-mail list. You run promotions, solicit Web registrations, fight battles with other departments and basically do anything you can think of to build your list.

Unfortunately, not all the data you gather is sound. People make mistakes on registration forms. Customer service reps make keystroking errors. There also are bad apples out there intentionally trying to cripple your list.

And what happens over time? What was once a predominantly healthy list begins to ail. People move. Individuals change jobs. E-mail addresses change.

It’s up to you to keep your e-mail housefiles healthy. The good news: Once you understand the symptoms of an unhealthy list, you can treat them.

Understand the Symptoms
The continued vitality of your e-mail list depends on you noticing the following signals of decay:

Bad e-mail addresses seeping into your list. FreshAddress has been in business since 1999 and has processed more than a billion e-mail addresses for clients. In that time, we’ve never seen a perfectly healthy list. Typos (acbliss@hotmail.cmo) and bogus entries (test@test.com) are everywhere.

In most computer environments, people are becoming more reliant on technology to catch typos. We’ve come to take for granted the precision of spell-check, the scrutiny of grammar-check and the speed of Microsoft Word’s autocorrect. Unfortunately, those same technology assists are not usually available on Web site registration pages.

In a recent study, FreshAddress registered the same 13 invalid e-mail addresses on 50 top retail Web sites. Not one site tested offered a correction for common spelling errors (e.g., yaho.com). Also, no Web site blocked more than 37 percent of the invalid e-mail addresses entered. Most sites overlooked misspellings, syntax and formatting mistakes; “dead” domains; and bogus e-mail addresses.

The potential ramifications of bad data in your list include:

  • Lost revenues: For every invalid registration you accept, you lose profits you would have made.
  • Dissatisfied customers/prospects: When visitors to your Web site enter a typo, it is typically unintentional. However, when they don’t receive the newsletter or offer they signed up for, you are blamed.
  • Wasted marketing dollars: Sending e-mails to undeliverable addresses is wasting your deployment budget.
  • ISP blacklisting: Every repeatedly bouncing e-mail address on your list drives down the quality of the list, which ISPs notice. You run the risk of being labeled a “spammer” and jeopardize your future ability to get your messages into your customers’ inboxes.

Inactive e-mail addresses sitting latent in your list. Even a good, deliverable e-mail address for your customer isn’t guaranteed to work forever. Those of you from the postal world know that customers move, and you need to work hard to maintain their updated street addresses. The same is true of e-mail addresses. People change e-mail addresses for many reasons—they switch jobs, retire, graduate, change ISPs, open secondary accounts, try to avoid spam, etc. In fact, studies show you probably will see a 2 percent to 3 percent natural reduction in the size of your working list every month. That’s 30 percent or more per year!

 

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