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.
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