The Risk of Mailing to Inactive Subscribers
When you mail to inactive subscribers, your reputation and deliverability are at stake. ISPs routinely turn old email addresses that are no longer in use into spam traps. These traps, which are also called honeypots, are monitored by the ISPs to see which email marketers are continuing to send emails to these invalid addresses as a way to identify spammers. Even if someone opted-in to your list with that email address and remained active for a time, if the owner of the email address discontinued use of that address and you haven’t updated your records for that subscriber, you will look like a spammer to the ISPs and your messages will be delivered to the junk mail folder or they will be blocked.
Even if an address hasn’t been turned into a honeypot, unused and invalid email addresses will still bounce. ISPs monitor the number of bounces your campaigns generate, and once you reach a certain threshold, your messages won’t be delivered. With churn rates as high as 30 percent per year, it is imperative that you remove the old, inactive, and invalid email addresses from your lists. If your reputation is damaged it not only affects the deliverability of that one particular campaign deployment, but your future messages as well.
Handling inactive subscribers presents a real conundrum to email marketers. On the one hand you risk potential sales if you remove inactive subscribers from your list. On the other you risk the deliverability of your messages by the ISPs. With so much at stake the solution is relatively simple: know what causes list fatigue, follow list management best practices, try to re-engage your inactive subscribers, and if all else fails, remove them from your lists.
