Yahoo is running a fire sale on dormant email addresses. All of the addresses in their dead pool have been released for people to claim. An individual can request up to five addresses between July 15, 2013 and August 7, 2013. The people who receive rights will have 48 hours to activate the accounts beginning August 15, 2013. Giving people the opportunity to claim the names they really want is a great idea for users. It is a challenge for email marketers.
Spam reports triggers spaminators more often than any other delivery no no. A campaign generating as few as one spam report for every thousand emails sent can get the account temporarily blocked. Continued spam reports will inevitably generate a permanent block completely destroying your email marketing program. Dead pool addresses that are in your email database will go to new people who did not opt in to your program. Pressing the spam button is the easiest route for them to stop the messages. This will hurt your business. Taking action now keeps the Yahoo changes from affecting your company. To minimize your risk:
- Segment Yahoo addresses that have not responded to your messages in twelve months or more. Send them a personalized email asking for confirmation that they still want to receive emails from your company.
- Monitor bounces closely because Yahoo is currently bouncing messages to the dead pool addresses. All Yahoo addresses that are bounced need to be moved to the “do not mail” list.
- Before the August 15 deadline, send a second email to people who did not respond to your first confirmation request.
- Move all Yahoo addresses that did not respond to the confirmation requests to the “do not mail” list in your marketing database.
- Flag all Yahoo addresses that did not respond to the confirmation requests as “do not mail” in your order management system. If you do not have the option to flag them, consider removing the addresses. Spam reports can be generated by transactional emails too.
- Ask customer service representatives to verify existing customer email addresses to insure that you have the most current ones on file when speaking to customers.
