Many marketers agree with you and are quite hesitant to remove inactives from their list – but a growing number of companies in fact are removing, suppressing or at minimum treating these inactives differently.

And that is the key point. Email is not direct mail and people feel differently about the flow of messages into their email inbox than they do their postal mailbox. But a growing issue is also deliverability – with many ISPs blocking email streams that have too many inactive email accounts.

So in the end the key is to identify the inactives, attempt to remove spam trap addresses, inactive accounts at Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. and then work to re-engage those who still want to receive your messages, but are simply not engaged with your emails.

Loren

We use a third party to send them out and always remove anyone requesting to be taken off our lists.

Personally, I’ve never really considered removing names of inactive subscribers. The reason is that we often get calls from people who’ve been receiving our publications for years and decided to contact us when they had a need for our services.

Personally, I believe that branding is a long-term process and recognition often takes as many as 24-36 contacts.

Are there marketers who share this opinion or are their experiences different from mine?

John P. Kreiss

http://www.johnpkreiss.com