The Pontiflex Blog

The Cost of Mailing to Inactive Subscribers

August 24, 2010 at 4:41 pm Jordan Cohen Leave a comment

Our friends at deliverability firm ReturnPath released an interesting research report earlier this week examining how major retailers deal with inactive/disengaged segments of their lists.

Nineteen month ago, ReturnPath made purchases on the sites of 40 leading retailers and then ignored every email message they received subsequent to those purchases.  Key findings:

• Most email marketers continued to send email at a steady, high frequency for the entire 19-month study period, despite a total lack of response from the subscriber (no opens, no clicks, no purchases).
• Only 27% of the sample (11 companies) eventually did stop mailing to inactives.  2 companies did after one month; 5 stopped after 5 – 10 months; and the remaining 4 stopped after 14-19 months.
• Marketers waste substantial sums of money mailing to inactives.  Based on the typical fees that ESPs charge marketers to deploy their email, ReturnPath estimates that a marketer with a housefile of 1 million names will waste $288,000 per year sending email to the 60% of its list that’s inactive.

Stephanie Colleton, Director of Professional Services for Return Path said: “We strongly recommend that email marketers, not just e-retailers, monitor their subscriber responses – opens, click-throughs and conversions – and adapt their campaigns to either slow down the emails to once per month or send a re-permission email to determine subscribers’ continued interest in receiving emails.”

The report further cautions that relentless mailing to inactives endangers overall email deliverability. “When non-responsive subscribers receive a steady stream of emails, or in some cases an increased frequency of emails, they will often begin reporting those emails as spam driving up the marketer’s complaint rate.”

The main takeaway is clear: Either find a way to re-engage inactive subscribers or stop mailing to them altogether. It’s better to focus on the active segment of your list and work to continually add fresh, engaged new names to marketing lists to compensate for the loss of names that have been removed.

The full report is available for download from ReturnPath’s web site — click here to request your free copy.

Entry filed under: Agency Spotlight, Email. Tags: deliverability, engagement, returnpath.