If you haven’t mailed an address in 5-10 yrs, would you include it in a re-engagement mail?

A number of people responded that addresses that old should not be mailed. I think the answer is more complex than can be handled in 140 characters.

Five to ten years is a very long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. It’s easy right now, 10 years ago as a nation we were still reeling from the September 11 attacks. On a more personal note, Steve and I were just making the decision to start Word to the Wise. But what about 5 years ago? I can’t remember what we were doing or what our business goals and limitations were.

If you’re going to mail addresses that were collected 5 or 10 years ago, you must give some thought to a number of questions.

1. How has my target market changed in the last 5 – 10 years? How likely is it that customers from then would be interested in my products now?

People grow and change. As we move through different life stages, we have different needs and shop for different products. When thinking about whether or not to send mail to those old addresses, think about customer demographics. Is someone who wanted your product in the past also going to want your product now? What life stages are you targeting?

If you can honestly say that your product has a 10+ year target market, then mailing old customers may be acceptable. But if you focus on a narrow demographic it’s possible that your former customers are no longer interested in anything you have to offer, no matter how compelling the copy.

2. What do I have to offer a customer from 5 – 10 years ago? Is my current product line likely to interest them?

Just as people grow and change, businesses grow and change as well. When we first started Word to the Wise a lot of my consulting was directed at senders who were having blocklist problems and often didn’t have permission to send the mail they were sending. We didn’t have to talk about bulk folders, as most major ISPs hadn’t adopted the bulk folder yet. We didn’t have to talk about Feedback loops or “this is spam” buttons because such things didn’t exist yet. They primarily wanted to know how I could help them get and stay off the RBL or SBL.  In contrast, most of my current customers are opt-in senders who want information about how to engage users and get a better responses to their email.

Sure, old customers may be interested in new products and re-establishing contact with an old vendor. Others may have no interest at all. Some small percentage having an interest in your product isn’t sufficient. You need to be sure that a large percentage of recipients are going to want your new product.

3. How long does my product last? Are older customers still interacting with my product? Or have they forgotten I even existed?

There are pieces of software I’m using from 5 or 10 years ago. I’d be fine with a re-engagement email letting me know about other offers they have. But there are also bits of software I downloaded, tried and promptly forgot. I’d be annoyed if the vendor tried to email me. That really nifty pepper mill we bought 6 years ago? Love to hear from them about new stuff. That random kitchen gadget gathering dust in the back of a drawer? Not so much.

So much of making decisions about email is gauging how receptive recipients are to your message. When trying to decide to email very old customers, it’s important to understand your previous customer base.

4. What value am I bringing to the recipient? Do I have something new to offer? Can I push a new product or new launch?

The core of email deliverability is sending mail that your recipients want to receive. If you’re contacting recipients that haven’t heard from you in years, you need to put extra effort into making the email relevant for their lives. One of the ways you can do that is to share your excitement with a new product line, or a re-brand of your company.

Another way to make the email relevant is to make the email informative. Talk to the recipient about how you’ve changed in the intervening years and how your products can help the recipient. Your old customers are more likely to accept your intrusion if you have useful information for them  with your old customers

5. Where did I get these email addresses? Do I have a good audit trail for them?

This is where we get to those pesky details. Do you actually know where the addresses came from? Do you have even a partial audit trail. Can you tell what product was bought by the address? Do you know when the address was entered into your database? Do you even know if these are addresses of customers or not?

In my experience, most companies don’t have good audit trails for older addresses. They don’t know where the addresses came from. They don’t know if they’re actual customers. These are the things that cause re-engagement to fail totally.

You should NEVER mail old addresses unless you can identify where the address came from and the specific purchase that address is associated with. If you don’t have that data, then your delivery is going to be awful. You can only aspire to get into the bulk folder. More likely, you’re going to end up with mail blocked at many ISPs.

For the sake of argument, let’s say you do have that data. Someone at your company set up a database that captured everything you may need to mail old customers.

It’s not enough to have the audit data, you should take a deep dive into the data itself. How many of the addresses are at any of the dozens of domains that have retired in the last 10 years? How many are @home.com, @attbi.com, homestead.com or mcimail.com? None of these domains exist any longer. How many are @compuserv.com, @prodigy.net or earthlink.net? These are domains that were popular long ago, but are no longer in wide use. It’s unlikely your customer still has that address.

Still thinking about mailing that list, because it’s mostly @aol.com or @hotmail.com addresses? That may still risk your delivery. Old addresses at major domains are often turned into spamtraps and mailing these addresses may result in blocking.

Statistics show that 30% of email addresses are abandoned by their owners in a year. That means that even 5 years back only about 20% of those addresses are still in use by your customers. The others are abandoned, turned into spamtraps or just won’t deliver. If 80% of your list goes into a black hole, how much does each sale have to be to make it profitable to contact those old customers?

Each question should take an average business quite a bit of time to answer. The first 3 questions are about the intersection between you and your customer. They’re about you, the business, honestly evaluating your product (then and now), your target market (then and now) and the chance that you will meet their needs now as you met them then. The fourth question is about what you want to tell your old customers. But none of those questions are even worth asking unless you know you have a database worth sending to. And even if you do, will the ROI on a mailing be enough to justify the expense to put together an effective re-engagement campaign?

There was a very long discussion on Only Influencers today about frequency and un-engaged recipients. Lots of interesting opinions and a lot of people strongly welded to their points of view. One of the best comments came from John Caldwell, though.

Pummeling people with irrelevant content isn’t any different that pummeling them with relevant content.  Once you’re at pummeling content has nothing to do with it.  They weren’t responding to your content before; what makes you think that it was just because they weren’t getting enough of it.

What are your thoughts on volume? Does increasing volume improve responsiveness?

We spent the past week with family on the east coast. Our flight back to the west coast was very, very early Sunday morning so I booked a night at the airport hotel. That way we could just stumble to the shuttle at some horrible hour and not worry about trying to coordinate drivers and cars and all that other stuff.

As we were headed to the airport, I pulled out my phone to confirm directions. I found a new message in my mailbox offering me the opportunity to check-in online. I decided to see how it worked.

1. Click link in email that takes you to a webpage.
2. Confirm data pre-populated on the webpage.
3. Select time you’re going to arrive at the hotel.
4. Click check-in.

Immediately afterwards, I received an email confirming the check-in process.

All the information I needed

We arrived at the hotel about 20 minutes later. There was no line for check-in, so I didn’t bother scanning, just gave my name at the desk. They had all my info, gave me a key and we were checked in.

It gets better. Instead of the normal printed bill under the door in the middle of the night, they sent me email. From this email I was directed to a website where I could review all my charges, confirm they were correct and then check out. I could even choose the time I wanted to check out. All I had to do when leaving was drop off my key and wave goodbye.

I’m often impressed when someone gets email right. I know I shouldn’t be, email is not rocket science. But there are so many poorly designed and executed email programs out there that it’s often a surprise when I see a program that works.

Not only that, a well-functioning email program tells me quite a bit about the company.

• They understand I’m traveling and don’t always have access to a printer, so they give me a virtual barcode to scan.
• They understand I’m probably reading email on a mobile device and design emails for those devices.
• They make sure the information I need is easy to find, including their address and phone number of the hotel.
• They don’t need to sell me at every touch point, they already have my business, so the emails focus on the current transaction with branding and invitations at the bottom of the email.

This email tells me that Hyatt puts my needs, as a customer and a traveler, first. And that does mean they’ve earned my repeat business.

The frequency recipients will respond to depends on the type of mail, the recipient expectations, the sender and a host of other factors.

For one example look at the mail sent by social networks. Many people, myself included, will accept dozens of emails a day telling me someone wrote on my Facebook wall or retweeted something I said or wants to link to my network on LinkedIn. Another example is when I’m traveling or waiting to pick up someone who is, I am thrilled to receive multiple updates an hour from the airline.

This willingness to receive frequent commercial or bulk emails doesn’t necessarily translate to marketing emails. When Sur la Table started sending double digit amounts of email a week, I down-subscribed, and had they not let me pick an acceptable-to-me frequency I would have unsubscribed completely.

A lot of marketing experts insist that mailers don’t send frequently enough. That increasing frequency increases ROI. What a lot of people miss are all the caveats in the fine print. In their minds, increasing frequency goes hand in hand with increased segmentation, targeting and recipient specific emails.

The idea isn’t simply to mail the entire list more frequently but to mail those who are more open to increased frequency. This is an idea I wholeheartedly support.

As a past guest and/or meeting planner of Millennium Hotels and Resorts we are pleased to share these occasional special offers. If you no longer wish to receive email communications from us, please click the unsubscribe link. Please note that this broadcast is sent from an address which is not monitored. If you have questions about the offer, please contact us directly. Our hotel contact details may be found in this email offer above or you may visit www.millenniumhotels.com.

This is the footer of an email sent by a hotel I stayed at sometime in the past. I thought it was a year ago, but I checked with the groom of that particular wedding party and it seems it was 2 years ago. My, how time flies.

But where is the relevancy to me? I went to the hotel as a part of a block carved out for the above mentioned wedding. It was two years ago and I’ve not been back to that city since. I can understand that there are long periods of time between visits to a city. And I can understand that sending emails to people who haven’t stayed in your hotel in 2 years might make good marketing sense.

What I can’t understand is why this hotel thought that this particular deal might be of interest to me. Remember, I visited said hotel as part of a wedding party. The hotel knows I came just for a wedding. So a good “come back” message might be to visit my friends and take them out for dinner to remember their wedding day. Or something slightly relevant to what I did the last time I was in that city.

What is clearly irrelevant is an offer to come visit the hotel and get tickets to see the local baseball team play. Wait? What? Baseball? Baseball in a city 2 timezones east of me? Really? They know where I live, they could have even made it slightly more relevant by offering me tickets to see one of my local teams play their team. Sadly, no, they didn’t even do that.

Email recipients want mail that speaks to them. That brings them an offer or an idea or information. That makes their lives easier or better or happier. What they don’t need is irrelevant junk clogging up their inbox.

What senders want is email that persuades recipients to buy something.

In this case Millennium hotels gave me fodder for a blog post, which does make today a little easier. But I also unsubscribed from future emails because it’s unlikely I’m going to return to that particular city any time soon. And if I do I’ll probably stay with friends and not in a hotel.

What did Millennium hotels get out of this? Not a whole lot, other than a lot of unsubscribes and probably a number of complaints. Oh and a blog post talking about how badly they ran this particular marketing campaign.

True or False?

Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

This is how you do preference pages

I received two emails today and decided that the ever increasing volume was not a good fit for what I wanted. I decided, somewhat sadly, to go ahead and unsubscribe from their list. Maybe I’d remember to resub after Jan 1, as I actually like their mail.

I clicked “unsub” and was immediately taken to their preference page. And oh boy was I pleased! They offered multiple options for lowering the volume of mail they were sending in a very simple to navigate page.

And, yes, I did actually choose the twice a week option. Because I do like their mail, just not multiple times a day.

Thanks, Sur La Table, for caring enough about engagement and relevancy to let me have some say in the volume of mail you send me.

Not good enough for you? Want more specific rules? OK.

The two rules everyone must follow for good mail delivery.

• Send mail recipients expect and want to receive.
• Don’t monopolize resources that aren’t yours.

The secret to delivery is very simple: respect your recipients and respect the ISPs.

Everything else is an implementation detail. Those details are often important, but they’re just details. If you follow the two above rules then delivery will work.

Many people, delivery experts and ISP filtering staff, have very negative reactions to a sender who says “just tell me the rules and I’ll follow them.” But, you say, that’s not fair! If they want to know the rules it’s because they want to do things right! Experience suggest this isn’t true.

People who ask for “the rules” usually don’t actually want the rules. What they really want to know are the specific, hard thresholds they should meet. They want to know what the thresholds are for things like complaint rates and open rates and all the other things that ISPs use to measure reputation and engagement so they can tweak their program to coast along that line. They want to do the absolute minimum they have to do in order to pass. They’re not actually interested in sending mail people want, or sharing ISP resources. Instead they want to know how far they can push things without triggering a negative effect.

They expect an A for effort. If they don’t get the A for effort, then they want to argue the minutiae of the thresholds. They’ll argue with the ISPs. They’ll argue with their ESP compliance desk. They waste hours or days explaining why the thresholds are wrong or shouldn’t apply to them.

Don’t be that sender. Don’t spend so much time figuring out that if you have a 0.12% complaint rate you’ll get to the inbox and if you have a 0.125% complaint rate you’ll get bulk foldered.  Focus on sending relevant, engaging email that people want to receive. Your email marketing program will flourish and your boss will thank you for it.

A study conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and InfoPrint reveals that of the 91 per cent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 per cent do so because the messages they receive are simply not relevant.

How are you making your emails relevant?

As a recipient I can

• report your email as spam
• forward your email to another account on another mail system
• file your email in a mailbox I never read
• block all your images
• delete your email before it ever hits my mailbox
• forward your email to public or private blocklists
• fold, spindle or mutilate your email
• forward your email to friends
• blog about your email
• purchase something from that email
• visit your website and purchase something else
• reply to you

Some of these things are going to hurt your reputation as a sender. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t make a recipient accept your email. You can’t make a recipient ISP accept your email.

What you, as a sender, can do is send mail that your recipients want to read. Send mail that they expect, even anticipate. For instance, it’s now noon on Tuesday, I know I’m going to get Ken Magill’s newsletter in the next 2 hours. Then I will read it, chat about it with some other delivery folks and possibly comment on his blog. I may even get inspired and blog about something he wrote.

Influence and inspire your recipients. Send them mail they want, don’t just send mail they tolerate. Because they don’t have to just tolerate your email. They can react in many ways, some of them positive, some of them negative.

Senders need to remember they only control one end of delivery, but they can influence the whole stream.