Comments on: List Attrition

By: Sloppy List management practices that can get you blacklisted | MailChimp Blog

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:14:58 +0000

[...] block him.” People ditch or change or lose their email addresses after about a year (see this post on address-abandonment from Word To The Wise.). If you haven’t been sending regular email campaigns to your customer list, you’ll [...]

By: DJ Waldow

DJ Waldow — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:24:22 +0000

Laura and Stefan -

DJ here. First off, just to end the jokes here at Bronto, I just wanted to clear up that I’m a guy.

You both make excellent points. I would also agree that there are a few types of list attrition, some in the control of mailers (“unemotionally subscribed”, bacn), some not (inactive/changed accounts, bounces). I should have made that more clear in my post.

Either way, I hear clients all day long talk about “growing their lists.” While that is important (with a 30% list attrition), I guess I’d like to hear marketers talk more about sending relevant, timely, targeted email. I’d like to hear that they are thinking about strategic ways to keep their subscribers engaged. Is that too much to ask?

Love to hear your thoughts…

dj – “the guy” at bronto (ha ha)

By: Stefan Pollard

Stefan Pollard — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:03:22 +0000

I totally agree about the different types of attrition issues. When recipients change ISP’s due to spam issues, they rarely take the time to close their free account. The address remains “valid” but nobody is picking up the email. Increased storage on free accounts has increased the time it takes to detect this problem which is why so many experts stress the importance of knowing which recipients are “active” vs. “inactive”.

Removing inactive subscribers is another type of attrition, but with different strategies and outcomes and often not counted in studies like the one mentioned.