Should You Drop Yahoo EMails From Your List?

Next week, Paul Myers over at TalkBiz.com is sending all his email subscribers with Yahoo addresses a letter saying they *must* re-subscribe using a different email address. Also, if they chose to re-subscribe using another Yahoo address, their subscriptions will be be over, done, finito, the minute a single issue bounces.

Why the draconian efforts? Paul told me on the phone that he's found "The Yahoo people on my list don't tend to read their email on a regular basis." Which means their average issue open rates as a group, are lower than any other group of opt-in subscribers for him. Especially now that Yahoo is discontinuing free email forwarding.
Why cut names when emailing is so cheap per name that it's practically free? Paul says, "I want a high density of responsive people. I don't care how many subscribers I have -- I want active, involved readers. I have no interest in big numbers of useless addresses. It slows down delivery, bogs down servers.
Forget it."

Sending notes of this type is one of several tactics Paul is famous for using to "recondition worthless lists."

Interestingly, Paul doesn't report the same problems with Hotmail. He says, "12 times as many Hotmail people will click through than if I send something to Yahoo people."

This story forcibly reminds me of how different email and direct mail are. In direct mail you need to track the origin of a name (the list the name came from originally) and each list's campaign and lifetime value. In email you also have to track the mail box provider. Are they at Hotmail? At AOL? At Yahoo? At work? How does this affect open rates, clicks, sales???

Ultimately, if other email publishers and marketers find trends remotely similar to Paul's, even more stuff is affected. If you are an ezine publisher selling ads, advertisers may ask you for an ISP breakdown before they decide to buy media from you ("How many Yahoo users on your file?") If you are collecting opt-ins yourself for any purpose, you may begin setting rules up-front about what names you want.

For example, in a campaign that our parent company MarketingSherpa is launching next week, the line next to the opt-in box reads "Please enter your work email address." Our Programmer asked, "Do you want me to disallow them if they enter a Yahoo or Hotmail account? I could do a pop-up saying, Sorry no free accounts allowed, please enter an email that's not Hotmail or Yahoo." We said not to bother, but wondered inside if that might not be a portrait of the future.

http://www.talkbiz.com