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Not long after joining Delivra in September 2008, I embarked on a research project.  I wanted to sample the end-user experiences offered by competitors to Delivra and compare those to our own subscription/profile management tools.  So I set up a brand new Gmail account and immediately subscribed it to about three dozen newsletters.

The companies I picked were those I knew to be doing business with other ESPs.  I purposely picked a cross-section of well-known brands from across multiple industries: restaurants, hospitality, consumer goods, retailers, not-for-profits and service providers.  Without listing their names, let us just say that you've heard of most of them.  They were the only senders to whom I've ever given this new address.

That was over sixteen months ago.  Since then, I've only logged into the account three times.  The most recent of those logins was yesterday.   Care to guess how many unread messages I had?

To stop marketing email takes more than just never checking your email.

Now, we've preached here before about the importance of engaging your subscribers.  To review, those who operate mail servers take an increasingly skeptical view towards messages sent in bulk but not widely read or acted upon.  For this reason, there are people in the ESP community far more experienced than me who recommend regularly cleansing your subscriber list of recipients who don't show--by their actions of opening, clicking links, or forwarding--any interest in your mailings over a long period of time.

Some of the sages giving that advice work for ESPs who handle the mail for the companies that filled my inbox with 1015 messages that I never read.  So I made a list and started tracking to see which, if any, senders had given up on me.  Surprisingly, only one company (hats off to you, ULTA) appears to have concluded that I was not interested and quit emailing me back in September.  The rest continued sending to me through 2010 in the vain hope that I might change my pattern of doing nothing with their messages.

Why, in the face of evidence and expert testimony that engagement matters, do marketers find it so difficult to let go of disengaged subscribers?  Cost may have something to do with it.  The costs of emailing an individual who has already opted-in are negligible compared to the cost of acquiring a new subscriber.  And while emailing uninterested subscribers en masse is known to impact deliverability, the methods used to by ISPs to determine things like throttling and bulk foldering are proprietary, making a true cost/benefit analysis difficult, at best.

Whatever the reason, this much I know...those senders will never have a less engaged subscriber.  They're not going to make any money off of me, and if they send to enough inboxes with similar lack of response, they may find themselves penalized by receiving systems for sending mailings with recipient activity similar to spam.

It's only been sixteen months, so perhaps some of these senders are on an 18-month list cleanup cycle?  I'll report back in a few months on whether any more of them have decided to let me go.

Chris Broshears | Product Development