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How Long Before You Purge? Apparently Never for the Gap
Written by Allen Stern - September 1, 2007
One of the most discussed topics in my Internet marketing career has been around purging customer/user email lists. When we create a new customer database, this is always one of the topics I spec: how long before we purge. Here is a very simple example of an email list plan:
- at 3 months of no activity, send a reminder
- at 6 months of no activity, send a "you out there?"
- at 9 months of no activity, send a "we are sorry to keep bugging you, if you don't reply, we will assume you are not interested and we will remove you"
- at 1 year, user is purged from the database
Why is this important? Two main reasons: cost and company image. Sending emails costs money and millions of extra emails a year can add up. Second is company image, which is what I want to discuss using the example below. When I interview companies for CN, I ask about users and then active users. Who cares if you have 5 million customer records if only 35,000 are active in x period?
Yesterday I received the email below (it's an image) from the Gap. I have not purchased a single item from the Gap in over five years. Yet they still house my account on gap.com. This email came as a bit of a shock considering that they know my purchase patterns and yet they believe it's important to let me know that I can now use my gap.com account at their other family of sites. It's great that they have merged customer databases, but if I haven't purchased for years, why bother me? No emails for years, yet now they decide to contact me.
It looks like the company has recently gone through some tough times recently and has also appointed a new CEO in the last month. Lastly, and what's quite funny, is that there is no remove/unsubscribe link. It appears that I either have to manually email the customer service department or login to my account and deactivate the emails. If I do the latter, then my account becomes active again, genius!
Does your startup or service have a customer/user purge plan? If so, could you share some details? If not, why?
COMMENTS - Add New Comment
Allen you are exactly who I would send an e-mail to if I worked for Gap. The guy that stopped shopping at the Gap that I might be able to win back with my Red Campaign or because you realize that the bad experience you had that caused you to stop coming has fallen from your mind and you are ready to forgive and forget. The person that was in the store yesterday is not someone you need to advertise to.
Brandon, thanks for your comment. Normally I would 100% agree with you. But after 5+ years of no contact, I find this email a bit odd. Perhaps start with a "Hi Allen, we just wanted to see if you are still out there" type email first.
I attempted an opt-out via reply but haven't received anything back as of yet.
I'm with you on this one Allen. After five years of no contact, a lot of people might wonder why they're getting this email. And some of those will happily hit the "this is spam" button as a result...
Perhaps the email went out as part of the integration program, with no involvement from the marketing and branding folk? Otherwise it might have been done differently?