Old Email Lists - how frustrating!
QUESTION: How many times do you need to email someone to keep the list of emails from being what's considered "stale" by industry standards?
ANSWER: After not emailing in 6 months, it's considered stale.
Next QUESTION: What if the list you have was created at a show and people hand printed their emails? Is that considered "opting in?"
Realistic ANSWER: Nope. I learned this the hard way and almost got my domain blacklisted because of it! This is the "fringe" of opting in.
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I hate spam as much as anyone but if you give me your email address, I think you should expect me to email you. You should not report me as spam or an abuser. The reality of it is folks still report you even after they provide a valid email address.
Why? My guess is as good as yours but I think they get so inundated with emails and offers that they forget who you are or what your product is. If they don't immediately recognize it, you're a spammer! I must admit, I've probably done that exact same thing a time or two and not realized it. It happens.
--> Here's my story and my effort in order to re-invite people that opted into my list at one point or another.
My initial list contained 4,323 email addresses that were valid at one point. I haven't emailed most in over a year, so I decided to pay a list validation service in an attempt to avoid non-deliveries. After all, people sometime abandon email addresses. Of the 4,323, it appeared that I had 2,392 valid email addresses, or 55% of them were still good. I just lost 45% of the email addresses via validation but I'm confident that I now have good email addresses in order to re-invite my folks back onto my list.
I don't want to take the chance of getting my new domain blacklisted, so I decided to use a gmail account that I created. I took about 500 of the emails and sent a very short email inviting them back onto my list and linked to the list opt-in form. Nothing complicated, short, sweet and to the point. Google didn't deliver a single email! Why? Because I used the BCC field, which in turn got the gmail account suspended for 24 hours.
I thought: you know what, I'm smart, gmail accounts are a dime a dozen so I can work around this. I preceded to open another gmail account and use only 100 of the email addresses this time expect I'll just use the To: field like Google wants me to. No problem. Well, to my surprise, none of those emails were delivered either. This time, I didn't even get a "reason" why. Keep in mind, I have all my typical email on gmail and those accounts continue to work flawlessly. So I'm baffled and getting short tempered!
I ask on the live chat for suggestions and I get "try MailChimp" as a suggestion. I did exactly that, imported my mailing list into MailChimp and created a simple email to sent to re-invite folks to my new list. MailChimp limits you to 2,000 email addresses for a free subscription, so I had to remove almost 400 email addresses just to do this. But it's working. I did this earlier today and here are my stats so far:
Successful deliveries 1,958 98.0% - the non-deliveries are concerning since I paid to validate the email addresses! 40 bounced....
Total opens 237
Forwarded 0
Clicks per unique opens 5.5%
Total clicks 12
Last clicked 7/23/15 1:19PM
Abuse reports 10 - AND this got me a nice little "hey spammer" notice from MailChimp.
Re-opt-ins: so far 2 - I'm still hoping for more, but it's early. I'll be happy with 100.
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Once this has finished running it's course, I'll provide an update. I still have to send out about 400 more invites but I plan on waiting a few days to do that on MailChimp.
Recent Comments
4
what you described is the reality with email lists
for subscribers, the spam option is just too easy to select, whether they think it is spam or not,
when I unsubscribe from a list, I am very careful about whether I report it as spam or not -- there are some that I will -- but those are the exceptions
clearly, my behaviour in this regard is the exception too!
all the best,
Yes, I've apparently chosen to learn this lesson the hard way. Here's a stats update:
374 Opened
33 Clicked
40 Bounced
39 Unsubscribed
Successful deliveries 1,958 98.0%
Total opens 489
Forwarded 0
Clicks per unique opens 8.8%
Total clicks 35
Abuse reports 28
Check out the abuse number! Wow, 28. I even got a very profane response from one person, who's name I didn't recognize so I'm not sure how they were on the list... but I did start with over 4,000 email addresses.
I'm glad I didn't use my real domain or email for this.
BOTTOM LINE LESSON: Just forget you have a list and start over! This hasn't been worth the hassle or time I've put into it. I got 4 resubscribes... yeah, 4!
it is possible those 4 will be very loyal followers & potential repeat buyers
so the effort was not a waste!
all the best,
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After 10 days, I decided to shut down this experiment.
BOTTOM LINE: I got 28 email renews.
I'm on the fence if this was a waste of my time but considering the time I put into it and I was able to keep 28 subscribers, I'll call it a great lesson.
On a side note, the spam report and the unsubscribes seemed to almost be 1 to 1. Weird