Don't Sabotage Your Email Deliverability!

The definition of sabotage is "an action aimed at weakening another entity" and comes from the French root word of 'Saboter' meaning to spoil through clumsiness. Sometimes marketers may be unaware that even though they're not deliberately trying to hurt their program, their actions may directly harm their deliverability efforts.

Inactive Addresses

Often marketers do something that seems simple and innocent, yet poses a massive risk to their email reputation, deliverability and results. Sometimes marketers look for quick revenue dollars by maximizing all the contacts they have.  For example if you have a list of inactive contacts that you've tried to reengage with no luck, I recommend to keep those contacts separate from your core, performing list.  By keeping inactives as part of your core list, or adding them back into the list, there is an enormous risk of the inactive contacts spoiling the great deliverability rates accomplished with your very active list.  Don't risk a couple extra dollars at the sake of delivering your message to an inactive list.

Another example of inactive lists are those where you have permissions but have not mailed to in months or years.  Sure, they gave you permission to include them in your mailings, but given the time gap they could have forgotten that exchange or even your business.  These are not healthy addresses, and should be treated as such.  Separate them out from your core list and send a campaign asking them to update their email preferences.  If they don't respond to the email, remove them from your database.  Why take such a drastic action?  It doesn't take many people to complain to the ISPs that your email is spam, which in turn hurts your overall deliverability to active contacts.  You need to consider is it worth the risk to take your core list of engaged subscribers who are opening, clicking and buying and sabotage it with a list of email addresses that will cause more harm than help?

Point of Sale Acquisition

A customer is checking out at a point of sale at a physical location of your store, they're clearly engaged and interested in your company/products. Some marketers will use a 'point of sale' sign up form at the check-out counter, where a person can provide their email address in return for a discount.  For some customers, there is no real incentive to give a legit email address.  Since they have already received an immediate discount, there is a chance that they will provide a false email address or incorrectly submit their address.  There is also a chance that an error will be made when transferring handwritten addresses into your database

When marketers send to this list, they may see disastrous results due to high bounce rates, spam trap hits, or a mass exodus via unsubscribe or spam complaints to the ISPs. These sends cause alarms to sound at ISPs and subsequent sends from this sender will most likely be bulked mailed and the fallout can be permanent or take days to recover.

A better approach to POS sign-ups is to send the discount coupon via email (for use on the customer's next purchase) or drive them to your website for sign-up. Another effective method is to entice customers to use SMS "text to sign-up" to build your mobile customer database.  Both of these approaches will validate email addresses and provide a healthier list.  If these two methods are not an option and you decide to use POS sign-up practices, encourage and educate customers to provide a correct email address so you are increase the chances of getting a valid email address for your discount dollars.

Small in Size, Large in Risk

It's a small list, how can it hurt my deliverability?  Even the smallest list of new unhealthy email addresses into your core group of proven value purchasers can hurt your deliverability.  You can have a list of 10,000 core buyers and if you add in just a few hundred or fewer of these poor emails and just a handful of those complain, the other 10,000 emails will never make it to the inbox. So, is it really worth trying to squeeze a few low-value subscribers out of a few hundred and cause your send to 10,000 high-value subscribers to the bulk mail folder?  It works the same for non-engaged subscribers. Why continue to send to people who have clearly indicated they are not interested? You risk deliverability of emails to engaged users because you are desperately trying to "woo" back subscribers who just are not interested.

In summary, as ISPs start to migrate toward engagement and reputation metrics to determine where to put your messages (inbox vs bulk folder), it's time to evaluate the risk of to sending to people who are not engaged. There are many resources, including this one by Kristen Gregory, on how you can remove those who aren't engaging without sacrificing ROI. Thinning your list can be challenging to explain to management but make it clear that sending to subscribers who are interested in buying will increase your ROI.  Remember, don't sabotage your deliverability by continuing to send to inactives, it's just not worth it.

Chris Kolbenschlag
Director of Deliverabilty at Bronto