Time To Sweep The Leavers Off Your Marketing Email Database?
In an ideal world, when every manager changes job, before they head off to their leaving drinks, they switch on their out-of-office email for the last time. Maybe compose a bright and breezy email response of 'I have left for pastures new. Your new contact is the wonderful Joe Bloggs'. Maybe go for a slightly more embittered approach. Something that begins ‘Unfortunately I have left . . .
Unfortunately for email marketers, that does not always happen; it is possible to send out emails for years to contacts who are no longer in post with no notification from the target company. Yes, some emails are forwarded to their replacements (which negates all that effort you put into email personalisation). And yes, some companies do have IT departments who set up standard responses saying ‘The person you have contacted has left the company’.
But very often email accounts just lie dormant on the company server, with no one logging in to read them. I have found that some defunct email accounts are not switched off for years after the person has left. I even left a voicemail for a friend at a company he had left two years ago (it was still his voice on the voicemail).
And all of this makes it hard to keep marketing email lists up to date if you rely solely on email responses and email bounce backs.
As Electric Marketing telephones companies to check marketing information, we are told, daily, who has moved on. We remove hundreds of contacts from our mailing lists every week. These Leavers make up the Leavers List Suppression File. A file that grows by 1,000 contacts every month.
Using our unique Leavers List suppression file, you can tidy up your mailing lists and email lists.
Sweeping the Leavers off your email marketing database is not just good practice which saves you money on email broadcasting, it also helps to maintain your email server’s reputation with spam blacklists such as Spamhaus and Spamcop.
And of course I can't get to the end of a blog without mentioning GDPR: GDPR obliges email marketers to keep personal data ‘current’ and to delete out of date personal information. For business-to-business marketing, the personal element of data held is usually only the person’s name and email address. It is important to recognise that GDPR does not define ‘current’. But if you are still using data that has not been checked or verified since before the pandemic, it is very likely that a good percentage of the email addresses on your prospects mailing list or CRM system are no longer live.
Interested in finding out more about Electric Marketing's Leavers List suppression file? Click on Leavers List, send us an email to lists@electricmarketing.co.uk or call us on 020 7419 7999 for a chat about tidying up your CRM and marketing database files.