Email Marketing: Separate Active and Inactive Consumers

If you talk to deliverability experts, they''ll tell you to use different sender IP addresses for processing your transactional and marketing email.

Marketing emails are important, but transactional emails (order confirmations, electronic invoices etc.) are critical.

The emails that trigger delivery problems tend to be marketing ones. So the argument goes like this: if you keep the two separate, then should your marketing emails accidentally land the sending IP address on an email blacklist, this won''t stop your mission-critical transactional emails from getting delivered.

So why not apply the same concept to your best subscribers?

Why not have different sending IP addresses for emails to "premium" and "standard" subscribers?

Premium subscribers are your high-value subscribers. The ones producing the most profit / responses.

By definition, they should be the ones interacting / engaging with your emails most. So they''re not the ones likely to hit "report spam" buttons and get you blacklisted.

This is more likely to happen with the less-engaged standard subscriber. So if the latter cause your main list to run into deliverability problems, you''re still able to email those premium high-value recipients.

(Delivery experts please weigh in with thoughts on the plausibility and usefulness of this approach!)

Possible issues to think about:

1. Defining a "premium" subscriber...at what point do you graduate a subscriber to the "premium" list? Or relegate them back to the "standard" list?

2. By taking out the active, happy subscribers from the main list, you make it more likely for this standard list to run into delivery problems...potential complainers now make up a greater percentage of the total list.

3. Spam reports are just one cause of delivery problems. You still need to follow deliverability best practices (such as keeping your bounces low) to ensure the "premium" list stays clean.

4. It adds another layer of complexity to your email marketing.

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