Recently, I let you in on a little secret about our newsletter list. We dropped about 18,000 (yep, that’s three zeros) subscribers. These readers were silent – no opens, no clicks, no interest whatsoever. So I took the plunge and unsubscribed them. What happened was what every deliverability expert could have told you would happen: Our list engagement started to rise steadily.
But there’s a whole other side to this case study, and it has to do with our deliverability numbers.
It’s hard to admit, but our deliverability rate wasn’t phenomenal before our list-cleaning adventure. Our partner ReturnPath gives us deliverability data, and our inbox placement numbers prior to dropping 60 percent of our subscribers was 60 -70 percent. It’s not abysmal, but it’s definitely not acceptable.
Although we were inboxing just fine at most ISPs, the problem was we were bulking or going straight to spam in almost all of the providers we really care about (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail).
A little side note about ReturnPath: In its default settings, it lends equal weight to all the domains it monitors, so bulking at Gmail is the same to them as bulking at an obscure international ISP. But for most of us, our subscribers belong to five or six big ISPs and we only really care about delivery rates for those.
All that to say, as soon as we cleaned our newsletter list of disengaged subscribers, our inbox placement rocketed to a high, 80-percent range almost immediately.
At first glance, 88-89 percent inbox placement may not seem like a significant, worthy-of-celebration jump. But it actually is amazing when you look at the ISPs where we used to be going straight to junk, but weren’t inboxing, i.e. all the ones we care about. Our Return Path inbox report is now a thing of beauty.
Are you on the fence about triggering a re-engagement campaign and a list cleaning frenzy? The minor pain of seeing your subscriber numbers go down is well worth the gain of better engagement and deliverability metrics. And we all know when your emails are getting delivered to more people, and those people are all interacting with your messages, it’s good for everyone.
Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts
Twitter: @ugigirl
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