Commentary

Marketing to the unresponsive

One of the points that David Daniels of Jupiter Research reiterated yesterday is the need to clean up lists and weed out unresponsive email addressess. 37% of the marketers surveyed, according to David, do nothing when it comes to unresponive email addressses. They continue to send email to the unresponsive address. Better would be have a program in place to re-engage those addresses, if they are still acitve, or drop them if they are not. David suggested that if a year has gone by and you have not had a response, you should consider dropping that address or at least send a re-activation email. On the other hand Dela Quist pointed out that for some lines of business that are tied to annual subscriptions and re-ups such as the insurance industry, where a purchase may only be made once a year, removing names after a year would be a mistake. In these cases 3 years, would be a better time period to consider removal from the list.
1 comment about "Marketing to the unresponsive".
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  1. Bill Kaplan from FreshAddress, Inc., May 11, 2007 at 7 p.m.

    Considering the 30+%annual churn rate of most customer email address databases, ignoring inactive and bouncing email addresses is something marketers can ill afford to do. Fortunately, there is a tried and true, cost-effective solution for re-engaging lost customers and donors - Email Change of Address (ECOA). An ECOA service can typically reconnect you with 10%-15% of your customers on your first pass, with this figure doubling over the course of the next 12 months through a quarterly updating process.

    Given the nominal cost of gaining a guaranteed deliverable email address of a former customer for whom you should still have tracnsaction history and interest preferences, the ROI of ECOA'ing your database on a regular basis is unsurpassed by any other marketing initiative you might otherwise undertake.

    Bill Kaplan
    CEO, FreshAddress, Inc.
    www.freshaddress.com

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