Ask HN: do you ever clean your email marketing db from inactives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: do you ever clean your email marketing db from inactives?

I used to do periodically clean our email db by hand, but it quickly became time consuming, so I built an internal tool to easily run list cleaning in Mailchimp and other ESPs.

It's pretty simple: it connects to the Mailchip API, looks at each contacts, identifies those inactive and either classify them in a special segment (e.g. "Inactives") or archives them directly. It also reduces bounce rate since it checks the validity of all the new incoming emails (e.g. from mispellings in form submissions, spambots etc) before the first email goes out.

I'm now thinking whether it's worth to launch this publicly. Would anyone else use this? How do you currently maintain email lists for your companies?

Thanks!

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I worked on CRM and Marketing automation software for quite a long time, and we always maintained lists by doing staged cleanings. We would place people in segments based on their interaction until we hit that point where we would move them to an inactive segment completely (but they may have gone through 10 segments first). We would occasionally target the inactive list with special offers but in general we didn't do it with regularity. The lifecycle and journey of the email through different segments was really quite specific to the client type and the journey type.

So to answer your question more directly, it is a critical part of what people need to do to have proper response rates and to minimize issues with third party filtering systems. There is an absolute need for this type of stuff, I am just not sure if there is a large market opportunity here. Enterprises should be doing this already so you target would probably be SMB's and other similar businesses, which means lots of work for low dollar sales most likely. Maybe I am wrong there, but that's my initial thought.

Hey thanks, SMB is a very valid point. Were you working with b2b or b2c customers/subscribers?

I worked on both, b2c and b2b. The journey's and acceptable patterns differed between those broad categories but the underlying process was identical.

SMB market would be where I think you'd have the greatest success with a product like this, again you'd just have to see what people are willing to pay. What I have seen is most of these types of products are priced either in bands based on # of subscribers or on a per record basis. You would have to just see what it is worth to people and see if you can monetize it at a rate that is worth the effort. I'd think there is a way just given how many people need services like this in the SMB market space, but they also can be a tougher market to sell into and keep happy. They'll pull the trigger faster on sales but can be very demanding of your time in support and in general expect a lot for the price they are willing to pay. Enterprises will demand a lot of support but they accept paying a premium when they are getting what they need, in general.

List hygiene is important but from what I’ve seen most companies have their own way of handling it (or not handling it in many cases). For most orgs the platform defaults are good enough. What’s most important from my perspective is deactivation and also identifying when customers/contacts switch either to a different channel or create new accounts with new contact info. That said there are already a handful of list hygiene tools in the space. But if your tool is compelling and you can figure out where to position it then sure it’s worth a shot.

Thanks for you feedback, really appreciate it! Very good point on identifying duplicated accounts across same/different channels. I really agree deactivation of disengaged prospects can really impact deliverability to the entire list.

How about we stop giving the right to companies to immediately start email spam due to “required sign ins” for one time purchases?

GDPR is alredy pretty severe on this

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