Improving email open and click-throughs by purging your email list

Email marketing research has determined that the common subscriber turn-over for an email marketing contact list is 30% annually and 2.5% monthly. — Article Alley

It’s really cool to tell your executive team that you have 25,000 subscribers to your e-newsletter, but what if only 20% of them open the newsletter each month? (A good rate by some standards, but not GREAT) In a list of tens of thousands of email addresses, these obsolete addresses can cost a company thousands of dollars annually in ISP fees. The carbon cost on the servers is probably small — until you add up the cost of all the companies globally that continue to ping dead addresses. And besides, what’s the point of sending email to someone that’s no longer there?

That’s why we just purged our email list of inactive email addresses.

The email that was sent to inactive email addresses

We identified the email addresses that were inactive and then emailed all those people with a final warning that, unless they raised their hand now, we were going to remove them from the list. The “warning” email was a both a courtesy and offered us some protection in case our reporting had culled names of people that were still reading the newsletter. Sure enough, a few people did come forward and even Tweeted about it.

All in all, it was a great exercise and one that we’ll be sure to reproduce every year. Read about the details here.