At the Email Evolution Conference in San Diego in February, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stefan Pollard, Director of Email Marketing Best Practices, Lyris. Stefan is one of the industry's thought leaders and can be found giving great advice in his Clickz column (www.clickz.com).

1: At a couple of the seminars here at the EEC Conference, the term Bac'n has been used. What are your thoughts regarding the problem of Bac'n and inactive recipients?

Personally, I hate the term bac'n and any other tech speak or destruction of the English language. When email veterans (mostly on the delivery side) talk about bac'n, what they really mean is irrelevant email. There are implications that the recipient did sign up and may or may not have fully understood what they would be receiving so this irrelevant email is tolerated and not actually spam.

My definition of spam is slightly different, I define spam as unrecognized, unexpected, or unwanted email. Permission is a practice used to inform and provide meaningful choice over what they recipient wants. Relevance is meeting that expectation, lack of relevance causes lack of "desired activity" and eventually leads to being considered spam. Continuous sending to inactive addresses is usually a sign that the marketer is not delivering on the expectations or needs of the recipient.

2: Many companies routinely cull inactive addresses after a period of time - would you recommend doing this?

Yes, I agree with removing inactive addresses, but only after serious attempts to properly classify and revive them. I've found through working with clients on this issue, that the first attempt to classify inactive addresses usually contains a few people who still respond, so I usually recommend the following strategy:

• Use segmentation to separate out inactive address from active, and change nothing else. Send the same creative, same subject lines, same frequency so you can make sure you have the right rules. I know of one sender who when identifying inactive forgot to account for new subscribers who hadn't received an email to open/click on yet, and began to funnel off all new subscriptions into the inactive filter.
• Once you are comfortable with the segmentation, change the offer and messaging to reward inactive for being your best customers. These are usually long time subscribers and should have received many emails from you in the past. Create an exclusive offer for them and reward them for patronage. If they are truly inactive, you won't see any responses, but if they are reading, you might salvage a few more to move back into the active pool.
• Send a survey to the inactive to learn why they stopped responding. Offers and incentives haven't worked, so try one last bit of two way communication, if no responses, then remove them from your list.

3: What can be done to re-engage the subscriber on a long term basis?

I think the challenge here is how to keep the communication going in the first place. This really leads towards understanding the value your messaging provides, and your audience desires. I've written previous articles on engagement.

4: This is along the lines of your presentation on Contact Strategies 101. What were the 'takeaways' for this?

The key takeaway I hoped the audience would get was that relevance is the secret to successful email marketing. Keeping that thought in mind, every email you send should have a purpose for the contact that is relevant and obvious to the recipient. People move through different stages in all relationships, and email subscriptions are strong relationships.

• Provide choice and control to the recipient and use both what the recipient has told you they want with what they have done (either email or web activity) to determine good reasons to send the next campaign.
• Identify the different stages (new subscribers, frequent reviewers or shoppers, long time subscribers, inactive subscribers).
• Use a calendar to plan out your messaging strategy for the next 30, 60, 90 days and then keep revising it.
• Identify critical points in the consumer life cycle and address them with proper messaging.

To steal a term from David Daniels, don't be a "blastard" and just treat all subscribers exactly the same with one size fits all messaging.

Kath Pay
Managing Director
Ezemail