Bronto Blog

This was a recent question posted on the forum of the Email Marketers Club* (EMC). Within minutes, the comments started flooding in. This was a no-brainer. A softball. My reply?

Simple answer. I’d recommend lopping off all email addresses that are over 1 year old. Don’t send to them - ever. I blogged about the reasons why a few months back: Email Address Shelf Life. Risk > Reward.

I was encouraged by other EMC members echoing and elaborating on my sentiments. The beauty of an active community is that they jump all over forum posts like this one. A sampling of some of the comments:

• “The longer and older is your mailing list the bigger is your problem. if you start sending a lot of invalid emails to Hotmail or Yahoo! you will be blocked.”
• “I would second the opinion of not sending anything over a year old. I would make sure you set the expectations with your client on the possible pitfalls of mailing data this old. I don’t recognize some emails I signed up for 6 months ago never mind 6 years ago.”
• “The best list is never the largest, but rather the most receptive to your message.”
• “Good luck sending that list without getting booted by your ESP.”
• “Why would you use a service to clean a list that so obviously just needs truncating? DJ is right, as most of the time of course, you need to dump contacts.”
• “Quite frankly your client needs to wake up. A 7 year old list with 2.8 Million contacts has just wasted them, at the very least, 6.5 years of time.”

The individual with the original question was not giving up easily. He wrote:

This [sic] people have a very well know website, very popular, and until 3 - 4 years ago they used to send a monthly newsletter to this list. Now they are planning to re-start the newsletter using our services. They say that the first couple of years they had opt in, and for the past 4 years or so, double-opt in.

I almost lost it. My reply…

Well known, popular, etc does not exempt them from having a bad list. Again, my recommendation is to chop off all emails that are >1 year old. Double opt-in or not…get rid of them. Too much changes in a year. Email addresses go dormant (leading to honeypot addresses). Dedicated IP or not, if you send to a 7 year old list, your IP will get blocked. Not good for a well-known company, right?

It seems like this topic has been a hot one this week. Our friend Ben Chestnut of MailChimp blogged “Real stats: How sending to old lists will kill your deliverability.” One of the sharpest minds in the industry, Stephanie Miller of Return Path, fired back a cautionary reply in her post, “The Risks (and Sometimes Rewards) of Not Following Best Practices.”

The moral of the story is this: Sending to an old list is very risky and most often far outweighs the benefits. It is no longer good enough to just “do” email marketing. Smart, strategic, best practice email marketing always wins.

DJ Waldow
Director of Best Practices & Deliverability at Bronto

*The Email Marketers Club is social networking site with over 1800 members founded in May 2007 by Tamara Gielen of BeRelevant. It provides a platform for email marketers across the globe to network and share information and experiences with each other.

A few years back at Bronto, I spent my days “closing deals” as a member of the sales team. While I certainly don’t remember every single prospect/client I spoke with, I do recall quite a few. One in particular stuck out in my mind because of their interesting name (OrangeCoat), in vogue philosophy (open source), and memorable names of the co-founders (Adam and Evan).

I first spoke with Adam and Evan in early 2006. To make a long story short, the timing was not right for them to invest time/money into Bronto. Fast forward 2 1/2 years (not a typo…I wrote years) and this email arrived in my Bronto inbox.

From: Adam Gautsch
Subject: What’s Cooking at OrangeCoat?

Creative copy. Catchy subject line. I marked it as junk. Why? While my memory is fairly good, I did not immediately recall who Adam Gautsch was nor did I recognize the company name OrangeCoat. Spam. Wait…spam is unsolicited email, right? I gave OrangeCoat permission to email me 2 years ago. That’s explicit permission, right?

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