Should you purge unresponsive emails from your list?

A while ago I got an email to this general effect: “we notice you haven’t been responding. We won’t email you as often from now on.”

Is that the right thing to do?

I’ve seen other efforts like this that give you a chance to re-engage before the sender takes you off their list. The reasoning behind such a campaign is the sender risks a negative impact on sender score by continuing to email unresponsive addresses. Some of them might even end up as spam traps.

I started a conversation on LinkedIn about this, and asked my friend Jeanne Jennings from Email Optimization Shop what she thought. She pulled in a couple of her friends from Only Influencers, a community of email marketing professionals, and it started a very interesting discussion, which I’ll summarize briefly here.

Jeanne doesn’t recommend purging these names because an email’s effect goes beyond what you can measure by opens and clicks. For one thing, if the recipient views the email with images off, the sender’s ESP won’t register the open anyway. And even if the recipient only sees the subject line, preheader text and preview pane, the sender might get the point across and drive sales.

Jeanne’s comment reminds me of the effect of online ads. Hardly anyone clicks on them, but just seeing the ad has an effect.

Samantha Iodice of The Sauce Experience added, “Not opening does not equal unengaged,” and Dela Quist of AlchemyWorx offered some infographics to that effect. Samantha recommends overlaying purchase data with non-openers, and segmenting them out to try different methods to re-engage them. Comparing engagement with purchase history sounds like a very good idea.

Jeff Mungo of Data Axle took the other side, saying the sender risks a hit on sender score the longer the sender keeps unengaged people on the list. He recommends one best, last-ditch effort to people who haven’t engaged in 6 or 12 months, and then to take them off.

What interests me about this discussion is that even among competent, data-driven professionals with lots of experience, you won’t always get one answer. As Thomas Sowell says, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”

You can’t run a business waiting for a perfect solution. You need to understand the risks of different strategies and then use your best judgment and take your chances.

Resources

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/delaquist_emailmarketing-engagement-audiencemanagement-activity-6726822031347720192-gQQK/