
Ask HN: do you ever clean your email marketing db from inactives? - federiconitidi
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.<p>It&#x27;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. &quot;Inactives&quot;) 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.<p>I&#x27;m now thinking whether it&#x27;s worth to launch this publicly. Would anyone else use this? How do you currently maintain email lists for your companies?<p>Thanks!
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davismwfl
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.

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

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davismwfl
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.

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theshadowknows
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.

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federiconitidi
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.

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

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federiconitidi
GDPR is alredy pretty severe on this

