This is a real Marmite issue, so here are my additional thoughts.

Firstly, I think we’re all far too scared of losing customers, or ‘sales leads’, but we need to re-examine what we stand to lose.

I’m not suggesting that we turn our back on potential customers. However, if someone is not opening your emails then it’s a sign that your email is going into their spam/junk folder. Or, worse still, the ISP is not delivering your emails.

This is very bad news indeed. It hurts your reputation and it compromises whether future emails will be automatically spammed. If you continue to send to people who automatically spam your emails then you might as well shut up your email shop, because sooner or later you’ll be blacklisted (although I’ll admit that’s a fairly nebulous term which no-one seems to be able to define!) This alone is reason enough.

So if someone hasn’t opened your last three emails then what are the chances they’ll open your fourth? As I say in the article, delete them. They are harming your reputation and you’re wasting valuable time and email credits on them.

Those first three emails should attempt to re-engage the user, and you could incentivise this. But I’m focussing really on those emails you send that end up in a black hole.

Okay, so you may chose five emails to send, or only two. But this exclusion campaign is vital and I believe every company should run one once a year. I think that even the act of talking about this will focus a company on looking at it’s list every 12 months, and asking questions like “who are we targetting”, “what do we know about them” and “what do they want from us”.

I see why there is resistance to this, really I do, but I hate spam. With a passion. I hate receiving it, and I refuse to send it. I want small targetted lists of customers who are part of our community, who we can engage with and who engage with us.

Finally, to answer your question: I’m in the process of doing this right now. I work with a number of good sized lists and I can see huge variations in open rates. I’m focussing on those with very low open rates, and looking at where the problems are. It seems that we have deliverabilty problems with Yahoo! and Hotmail, and so it’s imperitive that we clean up our lists to improve our repuation with these huge webmail giants. In the process, I’m gathering lots of great data on our customers and promoting our Christmas campaign. In that regard, I see it as win-win-win.

Speaking of Christmas, I guess for a toy company it’s an understatement to suggest that it’s a busy time of year for you! And I’ll also concede that there’s arguably some merit in a widespread campaign. If you have good data on your customers – name, age, children etc. – and they signed up within the last year or so then sure, go ahead and keep them. Sounds good to me. Timing of an exclusion campaign is important, and I’d not suggest a toy company does it in the run up to Christmas. However, November is the perfect time to do this for our summer holidays list, ready for the January push.

The bottom line to me is this: If you’re sending emails to people today that are not being opened, and three months ago they weren’t opening them either, then you know what I think…

Delete them.

rich

PS Looking forward to your thoughts…

But the actual advice here is dangerous & in 99% of cases would damage the results of a company.

Have you actually done this?

dan