In the past 6 months, PowerThru Consulting has reported several incidents of clients attempting to send blast emails and up to 90% of their recipients using Gmail and Hotmail were not receiving them.  On the surface, this sounds like an IT glitch, but the reality is quite the opposite.

As an organization, despite having thousands of people signed up to receive your emails, that high number does not mean they are all equally interested in everything you have to say.  
In a 2011 study, The Radicati Group estimated an average of 115 emails being sent and received per day by the typical corporate email user in 2013. This high level of email currency results in recipients quickly deciding whether they are going to open or delete an email upon their first impression and previous experiences. Too many irrelevant emails from your organization can lead to that member unsubscribing or immediately deleting future messages without opening them.

Strategic email marketing can avoid this undesirable situation. Organizations must pay attention to each member’s expressed interest based on their previous response actions to your emails. Using this insight, you should only be sending them information that they are likely to open and act on to maximize your overall response rates. If this isn’t your current tactic, then it is time to get started. Failure to do so could result in your emails being marked as spam, even if you run them through Convio’s or Salsa’s spam tests and they’re deemed “safe.”

After a certain number of users are not responding to your emails, mail services like Gmail and Hotmail will mark your messages as “bulk” or “spam,” regardless of how well written your message may be. Gmail and Hotmail have recently been utilizing the following set of criteria to detect spam email addresses:

• Number of people who do and do NOT open an email

• Number of people who do and do NOT click on links within email

• Number of people who add and do NOT add sender to their address book

The use of these criteria results in two different categories of email recipients: Active and inactive members.  To maximize the overall success of your organization and the experience of your members, here are a few tips for dealing with both types of email users:

1. Quality over quantity. Even though having 150,000 members on a list may come across as being “better” than having 5,000, the difference could damage your organization’s success if only 15% of that list are actively reading the emails. With 85% of those recipients inactive, Gmail and Hotmail will flag your address as spam, and ruin the experience for the 15% that are actually invested in your organization.

2. Automatically disabling email addresses that bounce 2-4 times is really important. Since we know that these addresses cannot open the email, keeping them on your list will automatically decrease your response rates. Salsa customers have most of this automatic disabling feature built-in already, but be sure to add the additional free service, “the bounce limits package,” to ensure that bounced email addresses do not continue to remain on your list.

3. Don’t waste your time on recipients who don’t take the time to read what you wrote. You will both be better off if you remove all users who have not opened an email in the last 6 months. If the thought of doing so terrifies you, then simply take those users “out of circulation,” rather than deleting them completely. To do this, add these unresponsive addresses to an “Inactive Members” group and refrain from sending them emails. Or try sending them one last email with the option to receive future emails, and then delete those that do not read or respond.

4. Test new emails on your most loyal recipients, then expand to a larger email blast. Try sending campaign launch emails to a subset of your members - for example, people that have taken 2 or more actions in the past 2 months. If you see a high response rate, only then should you send that same email to a larger portion of your email list, in hopes that even some of your inactive members will open it.