Removing people from your list

Removing people from your list feels like going backwards and is the single most effective deliverability work available. A list is not an asset by virtue of its size; it is an asset by virtue of the people on it wanting the mail.

Why dead addresses cost you

Mailbox providers judge a sender on how recipients respond. Sending to people who never open does three things, all bad: it lowers the proportion of your mail that is engaged with, it increases the chance of hitting an address that has been turned into a spam trap, and it raises the odds that somebody who has forgotten you presses the spam button rather than unsubscribing.

That last one is the expensive outcome, because complaint rate is measured against a threshold. Reaching three complaints in three thousand puts you at the level Google names as its working target, and the people most likely to complain are precisely the ones who have not heard from you in a year.

A sunset policy, which is the whole practice

1. 01Decide what inactive means for your sending frequency. If you send monthly, somebody who has not opened or clicked in six months is a reasonable definition. If you send twice a year, it is longer.
2. 02Send them one message that says plainly that you have noticed, and that they will be removed unless they do something. One. Not a four-part re-engagement campaign.
3. 03Remove the ones who do nothing. Actually remove them, rather than moving them to a list you will mail at some point.
4. 04Do it on a schedule, twice a year, so it is maintenance rather than a decision each time.

Illustratively, a list of two thousand where six hundred have not opened in a year becomes a list of fourteen hundred. Every metric improves, the sending costs less, the complaint risk falls, and nothing of value was lost, because six hundred people who ignore you are not an audience.

The unsubscribe is not your enemy

Making it hard to leave is both self-defeating and, in several regimes, unlawful. The United States requires an opt-out that works for at least 30 days, is honoured within 10 business days, costs nothing and asks for no more than an email address. Australia requires it honoured within 5 working days with no login. The EU soft opt-in requires an easy, free opportunity to object in every message.

Beyond the law, the arithmetic is simple: an unsubscribe costs you one address and a complaint costs you a fraction of your sending reputation for everybody. Make leaving one click, and put it where people can find it.

What not to do

• Do not buy a list cleaning service that promises to validate addresses and leave your numbers intact. The useful part of hygiene is removing people who do not want your mail, which no tool can detect.
• Do not re-import people who unsubscribed, including when they appear on a later export. Several regimes treat this as a separate offence, and it is the most common way an otherwise careful sender gets into trouble.
• Do not keep a list you are not sending to, planning to use it one day. The day you do, the mail is from a sender nobody remembers and the complaints arrive at once.

A list too old to use

Sometimes the problem is not a few inactive addresses but a whole list nobody has mailed in two years. The instinct is to send to it, because it is there and it cost something to build. That is the move that damages a domain in a single afternoon.

What those people will do, in bulk, is press the spam button, because they do not remember consenting and in many cases they did not consent to this. In Canada, implied consent from a purchase expires after two years and an enquiry after six months, so an old list may not be lawful to mail at all, whatever the addresses say.

1. 01Do not send to the whole list to find out. A test send to a small sample tells you the same thing at a fraction of the risk.
2. 02If you send anything, send one short message to the most recent few hundred only, asking them to confirm they still want it, and remove everybody who does not act.
3. 03Accept that the rest is gone. A list you cannot lawfully or safely mail is not an asset, and treating it as one is how senders lose a domain they still need.
4. 04Check the permission basis before any of this, because in some regimes the age of the relationship decides whether you may write at all.

The uncomfortable version: a two-year-old list of ten thousand is usually worth less than a six-month-old list of two hundred, and acting on that belief early saves the domain you send from.