I’ve been inactive in Infusionsoft for almost 7 years, but have had my account live and kept paying. I’m returning now to use the system again and I had over 28,000 email addresses when I last used the system. I’m deleted all of the original opt outs and hard bounces to refresh my list before I let people know that I’m ‘back’ but was wanting to figure out if there is a way in Infusionsoft to verify email addresses as good or bad before I blast to over 20k people that I haven’t been communicating with for many years?
Thanks for reaching out to us, @Todd_Ballenger!!! And thank you for being such a long-time customer. Our email compliance team will be notified of this post and reach out to you.
Hi Todd,
I really appreciate you asking about this before you proceed. With an older list especially when there is no engagement in a year or more there are multiple things that can happen. I think the biggest concern would be addresses that are no longer valid or have been abandoned. Those run a very high risk of being a spam traps. On average 25% of your list will turnover every year. It is very possible a large portion of your list might no longer be good.
This article on list Hygiene can be used to help identify those contacts in the app:
Now for those addresses still active you then might see high volumes of opt-outs or spam complaints because they have not heard from you in awhile and have forgotten you.
What I would recommend is to look at what data you have and segment the list accordingly. Look at the newest leads, most recent engagement, maybe even buying customers. However, I would exclude very old leads that had no engagement .
Take the segments and do a re-opt in process or double opt-in. I would not recommend any sort of a sales pitch. Make it pretty simple like:
“Hello there, it has been awhile. We are getting back into things here. Would you still like to hear from us?” or something along those lines. Essentially make it very easy to just opt-out if they do not want to hear from you.
This is also great opportunity to leverage the power of Infusionsoft and use the great tools for lead generation. That way you can begin to back fill that 25% or more in this case of turnover that you will probably see. We have added a great new feature on Landing Pages: https://help.infusionsoft.com/userguides/campaigns-and-broadcasts/new-landing-pages
Have read through this and appreciate the response… I used to have a pretty solid relationship with this group and an ongoing conversatoin, but I have not spoken with them in several years.
I like your idea of sending out a note saying “I’m Back!” and I’d like to continue the conversation… if you are interested in hearing from me further, please click this button, and from that build a new list of people that want to continue our prior conversation.
My Question is how do I do the above? What is the ‘new opt in’ best practices, or is there a prior campaign already built that I could test this out with a small population of my prior contacts?
@Todd_Ballenger, I’m an ICP (Infusionsoft certified consultant) and have helped a lot of our clients with all of this because it can be overwhelming. Here is what we’ve put together to help people who don’t want to hire someone to put together the pieces from scratch but need a start: http://barronmarketingsolutions.com/engagement-maximizer
@Cheryl_Hunt Thanks for reaching out to help Todd with re-engagements!
Hi Todd! I know you mentioned that most of the list you haven’t spoken to in years. But if there’s any chance you’ve had email communication with even a small segment within the past year, they would be a good group to re-engage. We typically say engagement within 6 months is the safest, and if that email goes well with minimal to no complaints or issues, you can expand this to include clients with up to 1 year of no engagement.
However, as Lyle mentioned, after 1 year of no email engagement there are more concerns and I highly discourage including them in a campaign or broadcast due to the many increased risks involved such as excessive spam complaints, high hard bounce rates, and hitting spam traps. All of which directly affect your domain’s email reputation, and ultimately your deliverability because mailbox providers measure and look at this when receiving emails. Email reputation is similar to a credit score in that it’s harder to repair than to maintain.
I know how hard it can be to lose a majority of your list, but from our experience here on the email team, I can’t recommend including them in an re-engagement campaign. I hope this helped! Feel free to check out our other help center articles.
You can run the list through Klean13 and uncover dead emails, spam traps, bots etc. It has become general automated practice for us to run any contact who has not engaged through list clean [Klean13] and then run re-engagement then delete the contact if no response [if not a customer].
List cleaning services are definitely helpful for list hygiene. I have to add that it doesn’t remove 100% of risky addresses since it can only report on what they know, for example: there could be newer or unknown spam traps they are not yet aware of, or they may not catch all invalid addresses. Another huge concern that can’t be checked by a third party service is permission – will your contacts remember they signed up years ago?
I don’t want to discourage the use of cleaning services, they can be useful on a more recent list if used in conjunction with other best practices such as permission and good list management practices. But again, it’s not something we’d recommend for re-engaging a 7 year old list.
Thanks for reaching out to us,