E-mailer Asks Permission Again

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society just saw its e-mail list slashed from 33,636 addresses to 4,510 and the organization's e-mail director is happy about it.

The LLS — a nonprofit group dedicated to blood cancer research, education and patient services — found last year that 30% of its subscribers weren't getting its four monthly newsletters because some were being blocked. The problem: too many spam complaints.

On a recommendation from its service provider ExactTarget, the LLS agreed to reconfirm permission from its entire e-mail list.

“There really was no point in us having a giant list of people who weren't responding,” said Chris Harris, who joined the organization as director of e-marketing about a year ago. “What I inherited was a large list that was sitting there with not a great open rate and a pretty bad clickthrough rate. I just decided one day that we really needed to clean up the list.”

Spam complaints are the No. 1 factor large inbox providers like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! use to determine whether to block incoming mail. Just as high paper and postage costs drive direct mailers to practice list hygiene, user complaints are forcing e-mailers to remove inactive addresses.

Still, the idea of getting permission again from people who had already given it isn't one most marketers readily embrace.

But there's another reason for removing inactive names: Mailing them is more trouble than it's worth.

“Why would you want to send to anybody that probably isn't going to respond?” asked Chip House, ExactTarget's vice president for privacy and deliverability. “Why would you want to take the chance that he's going to complain?”

There are ways to “re-engage” people that aren't as stark as simply reconfirming permission to e-mail, House added. For example, a marketer may want to cut e-mail frequency to inactive recipients.

House agreed that reconfirming the whole list is a drastic measure.

“In most situations, you're culling a portion of your list — say, people who haven't opened or clicked in 90 days — or maybe a portion that came from your brick-and-mortar stores, and you don't trust the way the names were captured,” he said.

Harris said he wrestled for months with the decision. “Your gut instinct as a direct marketer tells you that this is not what you want to do,” he said.

But it was the right move. Spam complaints dropped from 27 or 0.51% per campaign to zero after the reconfirmation, according to ExactTarget. Also, the average open rate rose from 25.2% to 53.1% and the typical clickthrough from 6.6% to 21.5%.

Most surprisingly, total clicks per campaign were virtually unchanged at an average 509 before the reconfirmation and 510 afterward.

“Because of the nature of what we're sending out, we really wanted only the people who are interested in what we had to say,” said Harris.