I read an interesting post by Andrew Kordek at Trendline Interactive this morning.1 Its premise is that “Organizations need to do a better job at defining an inactive.” And the fact is, he’s right.
I also think that this ties into recent discussions regarding whether “best practices” are actually the best things for folks to do on a regular, consistent basis. Consider this quote from Andrew’s article:
In addition, the general rule of thumb for X amount of time has long been 6 months. Not sure who made that rule up or all of us (me included) who have used it as gospel over the last several years, but 6 months cannot be further from an industry standard. There are so many factors that need to be looked at: seasonality, product mix, previous engagement metrics, time to inactivity, trending etc….that 6 months is no longer the standard.2
I know who came up with that: it was someone who specialized in reputation repair. The purpose of this “general rule of thumb” has nothing to do with reactivating subscribers and everything to do with quickly fixing a problem that was causing revenue loss.
This is the difference between triage and planning. I teach CPR and First Aid (something I’m qualified to do all the way up to Wilderness First Responder). In my more advanced classes, we study and apply the START algorithm for sorting victims in a multiple-casualty event. When you are engaged in triage using START, there are four possible outcomes for someone that you come across who is bleeding and breathing: Minor, Delayed, Immediate Care, and Deceased. All that triage is, then, is sorting your injured into one of those buckets. You wait on helping the Minor and the Delayed cases. You do what you can for the Immediate. And you completely write off the Deceased.
The first three buckets are the easy ones — it’s “Deceased” that’s hard to call. That’s why, in most circumstances, we want doctors to do that. And in our training slides, we look at one scenario in which you have to label a 3-year-old as deceased, even though he’s probably someone who could be saved. (And, for your peace of mind, we also point out that if resources become available, you should go back and try to save that one.) But everyone, regardless of age or socioeconomic status, has to fall into one of those buckets.
When you are dealing with a triage situation, everyone is hurt. Everyone needs care. And the care everyone gets won’t be the same level of care produced by the same decision trees you’d encounter in your doctor’s examination room during your annual physical. When you are with your doctor in an exam room, you have time and access to long-term information, allowing you to make more precise decisions. When you’re lying out in the field, unconscious and bleeding, that luxury doesn’t exist. The people providing first aid have to rely upon rules of thumb, treatment protocols, and algorithms.
So, let’s apply that to email. When you are experiencing good delivery, it’s as though you are sitting in your doctor’s examination room — you can take the time to look at various strategies for subscriber reactivation. You can consider factors like “is an inactive someone who hasn’t opened, or someone who hasn’t purchased.”
On the other hand, when you are not experiencing good delivery, when your sender reputation has tanked, and you need to turn to someone like me (or my co-workers), then neither of us has the time to engage in an extended discussion about what an inactive subscriber might be. This is a triage situation, and you’re going to experience some loss as a result of allowing things to deteriorate to this point. The people that you are working with to fix things are likely using rules of thumb and treatment protocols and algorithms — like “an inactive subscriber is someone who hasn’t opened or clicked in the last six months.”
When you hear about “best practices,” they are generally the rules of thumb, treatment protocols, and algorithms used to triage delivery problems. They’re good for fixing problems and represent a minimum level of care that will generally “do no further harm.” Just as the treatment decisions made out in a field are not likely to be the same (or even the most appropriate) decisions that could be made with time to reflect and make appropriate plans, following “best practices” is probably not always going to be the best decision for you or your business. But when decisions need to be made now, you need to have something to turn to.
It’s better to do things because you planned to do them than because you have to in order to stop the bleeding. When you have the luxury of planning, you get better (and more granular) options along with the time to accomplish what you’re hoping to do.
Footnotes
- Andrew Kordek, Retention Programs Start with Defining an Inactive, Trendline Interactive (Sept. 27, 2011) (archived Sept. 29, 2011), https://web.archive.org/web/20110929140248/http://www.trendlineinteractive.com/2011/09/retention-programs-start-with-defining-an-inactive/. ↩︎
- Id. ↩︎
About the Author
Mickey Chandler is a Consultant & Attorney with over 28 years of experience in Email Deliverability & Privacy Law. He has a strong background in email authentication infrastructure (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), ISP and mailbox provider relations, anti-spam policy and compliance, CAN-SPAM and state anti-spam law gained through overseeing the Abuse & Compliance team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, originating the ISP relations role at Informz (now part of Higher Logic), and working in the fight against spam since 1997. He holds a B.A. in Government, a B.S. in Computer Information Systems, and a J.D. from the University of Houston Law Center. He is a certified CIPP/US professional and a certified CIPM professional.
