Email addresses go stale really fast. When someone opts in to your list, you’ve probably got 6 months before the email address is bad, and maybe 3 months or so before their permission goes cold. Wait too long before emailing them, and you’ll not only get tons of bouncebacks—you’re going to get some really nasty spam complaints…
Hell hath no fury like a recipient that forgot she subscribed to your list. Do you think that after 6 months, someone will actually remember opting in to your list? Come on, after 6 months they’ll have received 17.3 googillian emails, 99% of which was spam.
It’s not that hard for recipients to report you, either. They just click a little “this is spam” button, and that sends an automatic email to their ISP. If enough of these pile up at the ISP, your emails will be blocked from then on. And you don’t want that ISP to be AOL, either (yikes).
So if you’ve been collecting emails for a few years, and are only just now getting around to emailing them, you need to re-invite them to your list. Send a quick email from your own email client or server asking people if they still want to be on your list. Ask them to click a link, such as your MailChimp signup form link, to confirm. If they don’t respond, take them off the list. They obviously don’t want to hear from you.
Here’s a great article with tips on this very topic.
It’s old, but not stale:
How to Freshen Up Stale Permission at Clickz.com
Update: Looks like this article is no longer online.
We love the idea of sending a survey asking for feedback. If you want to try it, we recommend SurveyMonkey.com (no relation to our monkey, but we love it nonetheless). Build your survey on SurveyMonkey, then send links to it via MailChimp. It’s like having a whole team of helper monkeys doing all your work for you.
Are you going to lose a few people in this process? Absolutely. Probably about 30%-50% of them. But think of it as spring cleaning. No sense in sending (and paying for) your email marketing to people who aren’t there, or who aren’t listening.
words words words… just kidding.
I just wondered if there is an update to this little suggestorama – because 2005 is a long time ago, and today I find that people don’t even know they are reporting us as spam. I’ve contacted a few who have ‘reported’ us and they had no idea. Two reasons – one is that many users consider junk to be the same as trash – hmmm… aren’t they? Well, no – ‘deleting’ and ‘sending mail to junk’ can be two different things, and many users don’t know it. They just get rid of the email and never see a message saying, “Are you sure you want to send that message to junk? Do you realize that doing so is the equivalent to complaining about the provider of this particular email and that you could jeopardize their ability to send email in the future? If this is your intention…please proceed.” Or something like that.
It really would be nice if the overall experience were refined a little there. Sadly, ISPs have many other things to worry about: http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2010/01/aol-layoffs-and-postmaster-changes/
Just an update: the link to the ClickZ article is coming up on their side as article not found.
Thanks!
Just an update: the link to the ClickZ article is coming up on their side as article not found.
this is a contradiction!!!
Nice catch, thanks. I’ve scoured the clickz site (and by “scoured” I mean 3 quick searches), and it looks like the article might be gone. Darn, it was really good, too.
There does not seem to be a way to delete large blocks of people from a list. Each one has to be deleted manually? A real pain when you have hundreds.
Lawrence,
Sure you can remove large blocks of people from a list. Have you tried going to to –> Lists –> Click on the “remove people” link under the list –> Paste in a list of all the people you want removed? One person per line.
It that’s what you tried, and it’s not working, contact our support team for help: http://mailchimp.com/help
Actually that does not work. It only allows you to remove members to an unsubscribe list, which is the problem. I need to get them entirely off the list. Otherwise when I search to see if they re-subscribed I get multiple results which show them, but on the unsubscribe side and I can’t see that until I click on the result. Even then trying to delete has to be one at a time. Very cumbersome.
I guess the only option is to make a new list from the subscribers, by downloading to excel and then uploading to a new list, but doesn’t that eliminate the Email verification process that I went to all the trouble to do?
They stay on the list, but are marked “unsubscribed.” We keep this history so that they cannot be accidentally re-subscribed (which could result in a bunch of pesky can-spam related lawsuits). If they were completely deleted from the list, then all history would be lost. This increases the chances that someone in your organization might accidentally add them back in.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish when performing searches? There may be some other workaround.
Ben,
OK. YThnaks for the explanation. The problem is that my account was terminated because four people marked as spam. So I had to clear the entire list and send a form and now many have signed back up. If I do a search to see if somebody is subscribed I also get a result that shows the unsubscribed. (Sometimes they are unsubscribed twice because it took two tries to get the Email correct.) The search result doesn’t tell me if they are subscribed or unsubscribed until I click on the name. Wish I could just get a null result when searching the subscribed list, but I get a result which is unclear, as it comes from the whole list including all the unsubscribed. Guess I’ll just have to do a manual look?
Love MailChimp!! Very nice interface and program. Just this glitch getting the list cleaned up is driving me nuts!!
Hmm. That’s definitely a unique scenario. What screen are you searching from? If you search from the area described here:
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/how-can-i-download-a-segment-of-my-list
there’s a toggle to only view subscribed/unsubscribed.
True. From that screen you can create a segmented list. In my case still over 300 names in the segment. When you use the only available search box on that page the results pull from the entire list and so you don’t know what the result is until you click on the name and see the profile. It doesn’t just search the segment you’ve separated. If you are wanting to do multiple searches it is way too cumbersome. And, the search results could have more than one entry if the person’s email was incorrect in one place or one email they use they unsubscribed and put in a new one. Thus three results for a search and no clue which one is which until you check each entry. Perhaps there is a way to create and advanced search?
You’ve got a great program. Sticking with it. Just a portion here that doesn’t work for me because I had to unsubscribe the whole list to be able to clean it.
Thanks
Ben, I couldn’t find that article anywhere online. But essentially, the idea is to create a survey in survey monkey that asks people if they would like to continue receiving emails and then send it out via mail chimp. Am I missing anything or is that essentially it?
Understood!, it’s a good advice to check time on time the suscribers!
[...] As well as: Send a quick email from your own email client or server asking people if they still want to be on your list. Ask them to click a link, such as your MailChimp signup form link, to confirm. If they don’t respond, take them off the list. They obviously don’t want to hear from you. [...]
I am new to mail chimp. I have legitmately collected over 8000 email addresses over the last 10 years. I just uploaded 2000 and sent out a campaign that yeilded about a 38% hard bounce rate. My permission to mailchimp was tmpoarily withdrawn but is ok now. So how can I clean up this list without running afoul of the terms of service again. FYI I was using this list off my own server before and Ihave only had 6 people ever unsubscribe and 0 abuse complaints.
I also just have had my account cancelled, my email dated from 2007 and have had 32 % hard bounce….I am still waiting for news from mailchimp… as i am new at this I find it a little frustrating… I only mail choirs, and the changing of office bearers is very high… and they dont always tell you….