Re-activating Old Stuff

On the tenth day of Listmas, my data showed to me someone reactivating old stuff…

Ah! The musty smell of old lists. You know, people who haven’t heard from the company in months and months. OR! Even better: They haven’t heard from us in years and years!

It’s true! This actually happens. One of my favorite stories is that of a company that found a list of email addresses in a filing cabinet that had been locked for 3 years! They called to ask if it was okay for them to mail it.

Now, conventional wisdom holds that a typical B2B list experiences approximately 30% churn annually. (And that’s a number that I’ve seen presented as a rule of thumb as far back as a 2008 MediaPost article by Loren McDonald, which suggests a range between 20% and 50% churn per year.¹) So, if you do the math properly, out of 100 addresses, at the end of year 3, you’re left with only 34 that are still valid.

So, if we assume 30% churn per year and we’re starting with a super-small list of 100 addresses, what happened to the other 46 addresses?

Well, some of those addresses are now:

1. Abandoned. They used to belong to someone, but that person switched jobs, lost interest, got too much spam, etc. Really, any number of things could cause someone to abandon an address (we’ll even talk about one of them in tomorrow’s post).
2. Repurposed. What used to be a working address is now a spam trap, helping either a DNSBL operator (like Spamhaus) find companies that aren’t doing what they are supposed to, or even helping the domain owner find the same thing.
3. Reassigned. While this might properly belong to “repurposed,” I wanted to draw special attention to it. One thing that several spamtrap operators have pointed out to me is the “shocking” (and they all have used that exact word to describe it) number of highly personal emails they receive in their trap networks. Some providers will actually open an address up to a new assignment to a new owner. (And if the thought of medical information or bank statements going to some old address that you used to own doesn’t make your stomach churn, you might need to think about that possibility a little bit harder.) That means that marketing efforts that were once solicited are no longer, because the person who signed up is no longer the one reading the mailbox. It’s kind of like a landscaper who wants to keep charging you because the last owner of the house signed up for his service. You’d be right not to pay him, just as the new owner of the mailbox is right to call your marketing messages “spam.”

So, sure, you have 34 addresses that are still good. But more than half of the list is bad, and that won’t help your sender reputation metrics. Bounces will rise, block listings are more likely, and spam complaints (to either the ESP or the mailbox provider) are certain to increase. And that leads to poor delivery.

9 inundated servers,
8 annual mailings,
“That’s our business model!”
“We’ve gotta make our numbers,”
5 SBLs,
4 authentication failures,
sending 3 times daily,
2 purchased lists,
and that’s why they’re having slow delivery.

Footnotes

1. Loren McDonald, Have You Tackled Your List Churn? (June 5, 2008), https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/84044/have-you-tackled-your-list-churn.html ↩︎