What Are You Doing With All Those Yahoo Email Addresses?
In looking at the percentage of Yahoo! email addresses dealers obtain, Yahoo is always in the top three and usually at the top. When Yahoo! makes a change it can have a big impact.
Yahoo recently announced that they will be releasing user IDs that haven’t been accessed in over 12 months and making those user IDs available for someone else to register. Additionally, Yahoo announced a policy that user IDs will be released after 12 months of inactivity moving forward. So Yahoo users who don’t log into their accounts in 12 months will lose their user ID.
What this means for Yahoo users:
If your current email is “[email protected]” and you’ve always coveted the address “[email protected]” – this may be your lucky chance to get it.
What this may mean for email marketers:
Once this update goes into effect, a couple of things could happen. Let’s use the example of Bob changing his email from [email protected] to the new [email protected] which becomes available.
1. If you currently have [email protected] in your email database:
A. And a new person registers [email protected], you’ll be sending your email to the wrong Bob. What do people do that get email they didn’t ask for? They hit the spam button which impacts your deliverability to all Yahoo users if your complaint rate gets too high (we like to stay in the range of 1-2 per 1000).
B. And no one re-registers [email protected], you’ll send to a bad email address which will bounce. High bounce rates can impact your deliverability as well.
2. If you currently have [email protected] in your email database – you may or may not get notified of the address change. Sending to the old address may or may not forward to the new address. Details aren’t clear yet.
What do we recommend?
Do a re-engagement campaign to clean out your inactive Yahoo user accounts (we recommend this for all email providers) and continue to purge inactive accounts moving forward since this will affect all Yahoo accounts that become inactive at 12 months. And remind your service advisors how important it is to always ask customers to update their email address.
Questions:
What percentage of Yahoo emails are in your dealers database?
Do you have a process in place for purging inactive email accounts?
What service are you using for your email marketing campaigns?
