This is crazy! Anyone ever clean out their lists???

[Kay King]

This is not a rant about mailing lists but I found it funny and it made me wonder how many list owners prune their lists of nonresponsive addresses.

Way back last Spring I purchased an inexpensive WSO and was not pleased with having to opt in for it. I used a gmail account I had just created for future use as the email address.

Several weeks later I checked that email account and what I found was email after email from that one marketer. I decided to let it ride just to see what his marketing strategy was.

Eight months later - to the day, that marketer has sent 272 emails to that address. That's 34 emails month after month for 8 months - and not one of them had been opened or read. The emails weren't sent daily as some days during the month were skipped while others had 2-4 emails on one day.

Yesterday I looked at some of the emails and found most were a promotion for an affiliate product. All of the promoted products were IM products and the variety was all over the place from list building to site building to latest launch to ebooks aimed at all levels from newbie to experienced.

Again, not complaining. I can (and did) unsubscribe. But I was left wondering whether list owners clean up their lists and remove unresponsive members or just keep going with the daily emails indefinitely. Also wondered if it's profitable to build a list so untargeted that it promotes the most basic new marketer products, older "new marketer" products, advanced launches.....on and on. (Two exceptions were emails about the list owner's financial difficulties).

Are there people on lists who will read 34 promotional emails a month from the same marketer month after month? I'm not any expert on list building but wouldn't it be wiser to target lists so that info and promotion you send are specifically targeted to a certain market rather than just for a broad (IM) niche? Is this why some new marketers complain about unresponsive lists?

Do you prune your lists to remove addresses that have never opened or responded or purchased from your emails?

kay

[dvduval]

I think it is the responsible thing to do, and it would be good if people would respect the people that first gave them respect by signing up.

[SpicyRobby]

Originally Posted by Kay King

This is not a rant about mailing lists but I found it funny and it made me wonder how many list owners prune their lists of nonresponsive addresses.

Way back last Spring I purchased an inexpensive WSO and was not pleased with having to opt in for it. I used a gmail account I had just created for future use as the email address.

Several weeks later I checked that email account and what I found was email after email from that one marketer. I decided to let it ride just to see what his marketing strategy was.

Eight months later - to the day, that marketer has sent 272 emails to that address. That's 34 emails month after month for 8 months - and not one of them had been opened or read. The emails weren't sent daily as some days during the month were skipped while others had 2-4 emails on one day.

Yesterday I looked at some of the emails and found most were a promotion for an affiliate product. All of the promoted products were IM products and the variety was all over the place from list building to site building to latest launch to ebooks aimed at all levels from newbie to experienced.

Again, not complaining. I can (and did) unsubscribe. But I was left wondering whether list owners clean up their lists and remove unresponsive members or just keep going with the daily emails indefinitely. Also wondered if it's profitable to build a list so untargeted that it promotes the most basic new marketer products, older "new marketer" products, advanced launches.....on and on. (Two exceptions were emails about the list owner's financial difficulties).

Are there people on lists who will read 34 promotional emails a month from the same marketer month after month? I'm not any expert on list building but wouldn't it be wiser to target lists so that info and promotion you send are specifically targeted to a certain market rather than just for a broad (IM) niche? Is this why some new marketers complain about unresponsive lists?

Do you prune your lists to remove addresses that have never opened or responded or purchased from your emails?

kay

Hi Kay,

I think the main issue here to think about isn't list refining. It's this particular person's absolute lack of strategy and 99% he was a novice in the IM field.

But refining lists of unresponsive e-mails? Well... You can never know when that particular person may decide to take action following your message. It may be in a year's time from now, who knows.

So I think that there's no point of deleting the e-mails. Lists are, to my opinion, 'self-refining' - those who don't want to hear from you will unsubscribe, but the rest may become your customers down the line.

Oh yea, another thing is if you have a list with a very low open rate and still keep on bombarding them with e-mails - but then again it would be clear that your marketing strategy/leads/approach/etc is completely wrong in the first place.

So in other words - I don't clean my lists because open rates are 30 - 50% and why would I delete potential future customers?

Rgds,

Robby

[TE2]

Kay,

Like Robby stated, I'm paraphrasing here, cleaning your list is not a good thing.

What you should be thinking about is segmentation of your list. If you are tracking your sales and link the results to your email campaigns, you will be able to segment it in various ways:

Buyers and non-buyers.

For the buyers - who bought most recently, how often do they buy, and how much did they buy. This is referred to as RFM - Recency, Frequency, and Monetary.

Most people think there is no value in non-buyers - not true, you just need to figure out what they need in order to make them a buyer. I send non-buyers a different offer/promo than my buyers. It works! Some will buy and some will not. Keep refining your offer.

Hope this helps,

John

[Ldimilo]

Hi Kay, Actually I clean my lists monthly...and because of this, I have an open rate of around 70%.

Personally, I would rather have 100 people who I can connect with than 10,000 people who I don't. It may hurt my sales but when I do recommend something, I usually do pretty well.

[radhika]

First thing : Sending 34 promotional emails per month is one heck of a (bad) strategy implemented by him. People tend to unsubscribe because of it.

Second thing : No need to delete unresponsive subscribers as above said. Just create sublists from your list while subscriber is subscribing so marketer can focus on more targeted promotins.

I registered with a message board last year. As a part of registration, I double opt-in into their list. I received their newsletters, promotions for an year. Some I deleted even not opening them. Some I opened and read > deleted.

Couple of months back, I received an email to inbox with an offer that I really liked it. I didn't even think of a second. I just clicked the link and bought it. He made $97.00 from who didn't open many from him.

So not all subscribers open emails.
Not all subscribers buy from you all the time and all offers.

As long as they don't forgot their subscription to your list and push your email into spam, it is fine. You can optimize your list.

.

[trafficwave]

I think there are really two issues.

List cleaning is one of them, for sure.

But the issue for this person is that they are really taking a very non-productive approach to email marketing. I've had similar experiences. Clearly, they are just working on the "volume" theory.

I don't remove unresponsive subscribers from my lists, though.

My viewpoint is this:

1. They opted in because they WANTED the information I was offering.
2. There could be any number of reasons as to why they are not responding.
3. They don't cost me anything by being on the list.
4. Some of my subscribers have purchased from me YEARS after being on my list! The reasons (excuses?) ranged from "I wasn't ready" to "I was going through a family crisis" to "I was just reading your information and learning as I went along", and all sort of other "creative" explanations.

So for me, the exercise is in rewriting my messages and/or broadcasting better offers, better copy, etc... whatever it takes to keep the responses coming in.

They ASKED to be in the list so I'm more than willing to oblige 'em!

[mmurtha]

Hey Kay,

Good post kid!

No, I don't find lists like you described (untargeted) to be of much value. It is better to have them very targeted - BUT some may argue that point lol.

I know I just deleted a list of 12,000 that I started when I first got into IM. I only emailed this list about once a week if that giving them content, and once amonth promoting something. I'd get a bit once in a while, but it isn't enough fro me to sustain myself if you know what I mean.

So, a couple of months back I was reorganizing lists, and other parts of my business, and decided this particular list had to go because it was unproductive for me to keep.

Some thought I was crazy when I told them about it. But for me, it was the right choice.


Mary

[IMChick]

List sanitizing seems to be premature if the list is double confirmed. They actually wanted the info at one point. I leave them on the list. Since not every subscriber buys every single offer, you never know when something will turn into a click on the buy button. For me, this only holds true for a non-newbie targeted list. If I had one like the 17 emails a day with subjects all over the place, then that guy should clean it up.

[Norma Holt]

How do you get off lists that you unsubscribe to and they keep coming. I have several like that. There is another that I ceased having anything to do with more than a year ago who has put me back on his list. The worst ones are those who say it will take a few days for the unsubscribe to go through. How pathetic is that. I send them to the spam folder so they don't get into my box.

God bless

Norma

[Kelly Verge]

Perhaps it's just me, but only a percentage of my subscribers will open a given email. I suspect that some might only open one email every two or three months (or even more rarely).

But what if that email they open is a promotion for a product that hits the spot for them? If I'd pruned them off of my list, they would never see it - at least not from me.

[trafficwave]

Originally Posted by Norma Holt

How do you get off lists that you unsubscribe to and they keep coming. I have several like that. There is another that I ceased having anything to do with more than a year ago who has put me back on his list. The worst ones are those who say it will take a few days for the unsubscribe to go through. How pathetic is that. I send them to the spam folder so they don't get into my box.

God bless

Norma

I have had some experiences with those, too. I used to look up their host, whois, etc... and complain about it. Now I just set up filters to delete any messages that come from them.

I can't imagine why someone says it can take a few days to get off the list. My TrafficWave.net AutoResponder system (and others that I know of) process unsubscribe requests instantly.

[Ldimilo]

Originally Posted by radhika

First thing : Sending 34 promotional emails per month is one heck of a (bad) strategy implemented by him. People tend to unsubscribe because of it.

Second thing : No need to delete unresponsive subscribers as above said. Just create sublists from your list while subscriber is subscribing so marketer can focus on more targeted promotins.

I registered with a message board last year. As a part of registration, I double opt-in into their list. I received their newsletters, promotions for an year. Some I deleted even not opening them. Some I opened and read > deleted.

Couple of months back, I received an email to inbox with an offer that I really liked it. I didn't even think of a second. I just clicked the link and bought it. He made $97.00 from who didn't open many from him.

So not all subscribers open emails.
Not all subscribers buy from you all the time and all offers.

As long as they don't forgot their subscription to your list and push your email into spam, it is fine. You can optimize your list.

.

I understand where you are coming from....BUT if you are using Aweber's new features, then the more people you have on your list, the more it will cost you....this is no biggie if you have 1,000 or less on your list...but when you start to get into the 5,000+, then it becomes an issue (it gets more expensive).

Plus, when someone "opts-in" to your list to get whatever it is you are giving them and then proceeds to ignore every email after that, it becomes obvious that they aren't really interested in hearing what you have to say.

People lose interest in things all the time (especially in the make money niche). If I were to keep all of my list..both the people who actually read my stuff and the people who don't, I would have a pretty huge list.

Then again, maybe my way isn't the way to go...who knows?

[trafficwave]

Originally Posted by Ldimilo

I understand where you are coming from....BUT if you are using Aweber's new features, then the more people you have on your list, the more it will cost you....this is no biggie if you have 1,000 or less on your list...but when you start to get into the 5,000+, then it becomes an issue (it gets more expensive).

There are other options. Not everybody charges more as your list grows.

[Dan C. Rinnert]

A potential customer will never buy from you if they forget about you.

And, if you're not maintaining contact with them, it's easy for them to forget about you.

You're not the center of their universe.

Before the Internet, I used to buy a lot of things from catalogs. You know what happened when a company stopped sending me catalogs because I didn't purchase from them in x months? In all likelihood they didn't get any future orders because the next time I needed something I bought from the company that was still sending me a catalog.

Same goes for Internet marketers. Perhaps even more so. And, bear in mind that even with the rates some eMail list companies charge, it's still a whole heck of a lot cheaper than ol' fashioned snail mail.

I am probably on at least a dozen Internet marketers lists. Some I have purchased from; others I may purchase from in the future. But, you know what'll happen if one of those marketers removes me from their list for not being responsive? I'll forget about them, and I'll end up buying a future similar product from one of their competitors, who didn't remove me from their list.

[Ldimilo]

I don't know...When I first got in the internet marketing game (it was by mistake..I built a newsletter mainly because I had like minded folk interested in what I was interested in), my open rates were through the roof...

Of course, I didn't understand at the time exactly how unique that was considering the average open rate. Now I realize what I, as then a non-marketer, was doing when I sent things out...I was building a connection. But I think that 'connection' goes a long way when it comes to pandering to the average person on the list.

And to be quite honest with you, while I don't expect them to open every email, a person who hasn't opened my email in several months is basically saying that they don't really connect.

Could I make an extra sale or two along the way by some weird freak chance that they mistake my email with your Aunt Liddy in Arizona and click on it?

Perhaps...

But really...I guess the question is this...what would you rather have...

A 10,000 person list with a 25-30% open rate average and a 2-5% CTR

OR

A 1,000 person list that grows much more slowly with a 50-65% open rate and a 30-50% CTR?

Personally, I would rather have the latter but then again maybe I am being too sensitive here and not as much of a pro as the guys that can take it on the chin.

I love the email responses I get. I love responsive lists. But most of all, I like lists that like me and view me as more than just "another marketer trying to sell them stuff".

And that is really why I prune my list.

As always, right or wrong, just another perspective.

[Kay King]

But the issue for this person is that they are really taking a very non-productive approach to email marketing. I've had similar experiences. Clearly, they are just working on the "volume" theory.

That's one reason I posted this. In 8 months, this list owner has not changed his strategy at all that I could see - he blasts promotions. The titles are things like "don't miss this", "you gotta read this" - and similar rather blatant subject lines that scream "I'm trying to sell you something".

To me, it's an example of a newer marketer who is clearly "taking action" - but whether the action makes sense is another story. Have to wonder what his open rate is for that list.

Another is that many autoresponders do charge per thousand after a certain limit.

I did the same as Mary (though a smaller list) - and dumped a list a couple years ago. It was a responsive list in that many contacted me with questions. BUT - it was a freebie seekers list and the time spent wasn't worth it.

After 8 months of constant emails that were never opened - I'd think the person likely wasn't interested in what I was sending. I'd either prune the list - or change my tactics.

kay