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Email Marketing - "Inactive is No Longer Neutral"

by TrekkieGrrrl
5 replies
Has anyone else read the latest mailing from GetResponse?

The following is a quote from their email to their subscribers:

"GetResponse has always had a strict opt-in policy, as have many ESPs for as long as I can remember. Permission based email is the key to success in Email Marketing. However… this may not be enough for your friendly ISP. The new word on the street is ACTIVE.


We’re hearing it at industry events and on blogs, everywhere the experts are talking about trends.

What does this mean? Well, when it comes to deliverability we’ve always been concerned with hitting the inbox and reducing bounces. Anything after that was gravy. This is changing. Here’s the deal.

Repeated mailings to inactive mailboxes are frowned upon by many ISPs. They consider it bad email marketing practice at best, spamming at worst. Either way, it can affect your domain reputation. So I’m going to kick off a discussion, and our GetResponse Deliverability Experts will follow up with detailed tactics and advice.

The bottom line is emails now have to be active, which means opens, clicks and forwards, in order to avoid ISP scrutiny. If you’re sending to people that rarely do any of these things, your deliverability (and rep) will suffer."

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How is this going to affect IMers, in your opinion? It appears that it's not just that emails need to be delivered, but opened on a periodic basis.

Obviously, that's the goal in any email campaign, but it appears that penalties might be in the works for those that don't get their emails opened.

Or is this a common practice that I didn't know of?

I'd love to hear the more experienced people weigh in on this issue.
#email #marketing
  • Profile picture of the author rbaartz
    This is one of the reasons why a hosted email solution is better
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    • Profile picture of the author tpw
      Originally Posted by rbaartz View Post

      This is one of the reasons why a hosted email solution is better

      GetResponse is a hosted solution... :rolleyes:


      To the OP, I don't think this is so much a bad thing. I would have no problem dropping a subscriber that does not open my messages.

      It is beneficial to me in that I have lower overhead for mails sent, and it is beneficial to the ISP in that they are consuming less hard drive space.

      It is a win-win, don't you think?
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      • Profile picture of the author Doug Wakefield
        They are saving me the effort. I am fine with it.
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      • Profile picture of the author TrekkieGrrrl
        Originally Posted by tpw View Post

        GetResponse is a hosted solution... :rolleyes:


        To the OP, I don't think this is so much a bad thing. I would have no problem dropping a subscriber that does not open my messages.

        It is beneficial to me in that I have lower overhead for mails sent, and it is beneficial to the ISP in that they are consuming less hard drive space.

        It is a win-win, don't you think?
        I guess you have a good point. If they aren't opening the emails in X number of days or months, it's no loss.

        The email from GetResponse goes on to give ways to help subscribers become active, such as making email subject lines more engaging, etc.

        I suppose this isn't a bad thing when you look at it that way.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
    Originally Posted by TrekkieGrrrl View Post

    Repeated mailings to inactive mailboxes are frowned upon by many ISPs. They consider it bad email marketing practice at best, spamming at worst. Either way, it can affect your domain reputation.
    There are newsletters I have subscribed to by eMail. I liked the convenience of them coming into my eMail instead of having to go to a website to get the information. So, just because I'm not clicking links does not mean that I'm not reading.

    And, as long as my address is not bouncing messages back, the sender has no idea whether I'm reading or not. They have no way of knowing whether my working eMail address is "active" or "inactive." So, why would they want to chance removing me from their list?

    On the other hand, the ISP does know whether the account is active or inactive. They can tell whether I last logged in yesterday or eighteen months ago. So, if the ISP sees repeated eMails to "inactive" mailboxes, instead of blaming the sender for engaging in a "bad email marketing practice" or considering them spammers, why don't they reconsider their own terms of use of letting inactive mailbox accounts sit on their mailservers instead of deleting them?

    Legitimate eMail marketers shouldn't be held in contempt because the ISPs are too bloody lazy to write or enforce a terms of use and purge inactive accounts after a predetermined period of time.
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