5 minute read
Keeping a list clean without chasing anyone
Every list falls out of date at roughly the rate your organisation changes, which is faster than good intentions can keep up with.
Last reviewed
Why lists fall out of date
Not carelessness. A structural problem: the person who knows a detail has changed is never the person allowed to change it.
Someone moves from the Leeds site to Manchester. They know on day one. You find out in four months, when they mention that they are still getting the Leeds newsletter - or more likely you never find out, because they simply stopped reading it. Multiply that by every team move, secondment, name change, leaver and returner in a year.
A quarterly audit does not fix this. It moves the work to you, does it four times a year instead of continuously, and still relies on you knowing something you have no way of knowing.
Give the correction back to the person who has it
The whole trick is a link at the bottom of what you send that lets somebody fix their own details in about fifteen seconds, on their phone, without an account or a password.
- No login means they will actually do it
- A password reset is where a fifteen-second correction becomes a task for another day, and then never. They click the link, see their answers, change the wrong one, done.
- Every correction is one you did not have to make
- The list maintains itself in the background instead of arriving as a job on your desk every quarter.
- You keep the history
- A change is recorded against the exact version of the form they saw, so if anybody ever asks why somebody was on a list, the answer exists rather than being reconstructed.
Let people leave, properly
An unsubscribe link feels like a loss and is the opposite. Somebody who has quietly stopped reading is still in your numbers, still making your open rate look worse than it is, and still a person you are emailing who does not want it.
Someone who leaves cleanly tells you something true. Your list gets smaller and every number you report gets more honest - which matters the first time you have to justify the list to somebody holding a budget.
Making it hard to leave also stops working the moment somebody decides the easiest route is to mark you as spam, which affects everything your organisation sends, not just yours.
The three things worth doing once a year
Self-service handles the continuous part. These are the ones it cannot.
- Look at who never confirmed
- People who started signing up and never finished are not on your list and never were. They are cleared out automatically after 30 days, but the number is worth a glance - a big one usually means the form asks too much.
- Check the questions still earn their place
- A question nobody has ever filtered on is a question costing you sign-ups. Remove it. The answers people already gave are kept, so it is reversible.
- Re-ask the segmenting question, not the whole form
- If one answer drives what you send - site, team, topics - a single note asking people to check that one thing does more than a full re-registration, and annoys nobody.
Things worth being straight about
- A smaller list is usually a better one. Six hundred people who chose to be there beats four thousand from a directory export, and it is easier to defend.
- An address that stops working is noticed. When somebody leaves the organisation their mailbox stops accepting mail, and that is the one kind of change they cannot correct themselves. A permanent failure marks them at once and they stop counting towards your plan; a temporary one is counted and tolerated three times first, because a full mailbox is not a departure.
- Deleting somebody means deleting them. There is a 30-day window to undo an accident and after that it is gone, including from backups within a further 35 days.
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