I was reading this article from Email Insider about how to deal with email non-responders.

The author works at Acxiom, a gigantic database marketing outfit. I was expecting better than I got.

Essentially this guy seems to be saying … Look, it’s cheaper to just keep emailing them than it is to figure out any kind of suppression strategy for non-responders.

I guess that’s tempting. Maybe marketers who don’t care about their brand can get away with it.

I suppose the reasoning ultimately is … Hey, they can always unsubscribe (if the marketer isn’t spamming in the first place).

But it doesn’t strike me as a wise approach for nonprofit marketers.

Yes, of course, you should make it plainly obvious and simple for folks on your email lists to get off. And you should respect their decision (although I’d recommend using Unsubscribe tools that let you ask why … useful intelligence gathering).

And yes, your email list will have ‘Lurkers’ — folks who aren’t inclined to respond to email overtures, but who are indeed interested and paying attention … arguably, to a point they’re tacitly giving you permission to come back by not Unsubscribing.

So if you routinely examine your non-responders a bit (after some set period of inactivity or number of non-responds), which I recommend, you might begin by identifying how you got them on your list in the first place? Something interested them enough to give you permission. You do source your email sign-ups, don’t you?! Assuming you know what they initially responded to, make sure you try delivering one or two messages that are clearly relevant to that initial trigger. See if that awakens them.

And if you check by source, you might indeed find a pattern … some acquisition sources or methods might simply not have much ‘lifetime value’. And if you devoted valuable time, money or promotional effort to those sources, you might not want to do so again.

Also, check to see if you are responding to their stated channel preferences. Have they told you at some point they preferred to be contacted, say, by mail? And if they haven’t, but you’ve captured a mailing address, try engaging them by mail. You might be pleasantly surprised at the response.

Finally, you can tackle their non-response head-on. Try asking them why they haven’t been responding lately. Many might not — guess what — respond to that inquiry. But some will, and again, you might learn something valuable.

But I just can’t buy the concept of emailing non-responders relentlessly, endlessly. At the very least, why should you delude yourself as to the quality of your email list when the responsiveness just isn’t there? In my book email list quality, as measured by responsiveness, ultimately trumps volume.

Tom