May 19 2010
Defining Inactive Users for Reputation Management
Recently, our strategic services team presented a webinar on re-engaging inactive users. In that discussion, they focused on the tremendous ROI benefits from focusing on users who aren’t regularly engaging with your email. During the webinar, the speakers spoke about testing mailing frequencies for your less engaged segments. They did not suggest suppressing inactive subscribers entirely. From a deliverability perspective this is an important detail for mailers looking to maintain long term list health to consider. There are three categories of ‘inactive’ subscribers that apply to deliverability and sender reputation:
- De-activated users: Every ISP and webmail provider handles de-activations differently, and most don’t publish their user activity requirements. Some providers such as Microsoft have publicly stated that they use old, recycled, addresses to identify potential spammers. Of course, defunct addresses will bounce. A smaller percentage of addresses that are not regularly mailed risk hitting these formerly active, but now converted to ‘spamtrap’ addresses, with subsequent mailings. The key to avoiding this situation is to never let an inactive email segment or other email list sit for longer than 6 months. Ideally, all addresses should be mailed at least once per quarter to ensure continued activity.
- “Mostly dead” users: One of my favorite movies is the Princess Bride, especially the scene with Billy Crystal as Miracle Max where he says “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.” Some ISPs and webmail providers will start the de-activation process, yet still enable successful email deliveries. Yahoo! publicly states that accounts are de-activated after 4 months of inactivity, but gives users a grace period to come back and re-activate their accounts. AOL and other ISPs have confirmed that they closely look at these types of accounts to identify potential spam activity since spammers will regularly create these accounts to mitigate their overall complaint rates directed to other users at the same ISP. These mailboxes will not generate a hard bounce error code — as would normally result from users who reach their storage limits (mailbox full), unknown users or unavailable users (resulting in bounce error MAILER DAEMON). It’s hard to distinguish these three types of subscribers, which is why it’s important to implement proactive marketing campaigns to target those subscribers on the brink of lapsing.
- Disengaged users: Due to spammers registering fake accounts, ISPs and webmail providers are working on using more indicative metrics other than spam button complaint rates to decide whether email is spam. Their best gauge for this is image rendering, since legitimate users make the effort to turn on images. The good news here is that, most legitimate marketers should be well above the typical <1% threshold associated with spam that these anti-spam filters target. In addition, some providers like Microsoft and Gmail have added an unsubscribe button that is also helpful in identifying legitimate emailers vs. spam. The bad news is some of these recent anti-spam discussions are considering individual-level filtering as opposed to using broad metrics to deliver or block senders altogether. To be clear, no webmail or ISPs that we’re aware of currently apply image or other behavior specific filtering in their anti-spam rules today.
These are the three types of inactive subscribers to keep in mind. Treat them carefully and your email program will maintain a sterling reputation.
[...] my last blog post, I spoke about ‘mostly dead’ email recipients who are closely monitored as an anti-spam measure because their accounts are being neglected. Not [...]