Verizon Media = Yahoo + Verizon + AOL
While the Verizon Media merger may be ‘old’ news, what is new is that within the last week, Yahoo has started to purge their abandoned accounts. Have you noticed an increase in your bounce rate at Yahoo? Have you seen this bounce error?
554 delivery error: dd Sorry, your message to xxxxxxxx@yahoo.com cannot be delivered. This mailbox is disabled (554.30).
The message states the mailbox is disabled, which will result in the Omeda process flagging that email address as a hard bounce. The invalid email address will then be automatically removed from all future sends when you suppress it in your queries. What this ultimately means is that you have been sending emails to yahoo accounts where the owners of those email addresses have not accessed that mailbox in over 1 year. Not only is your engagement metric zero, it is the same for every other sender that has been sending to that email address as well.
What Does This Mean For Your Email Engagement?
Engagement is a known, key metric to achieving Inbox delivery. As discussed in the email engagement blog series, an engaged audience is extremely important. The update and purge that Yahoo has begun for unused email addresses could be impacting your audience lists. A quick review of your sends to Yahoo and the bounce rate over the past week is a strong way to see how unengaged the remainder of your list is. Exploring your customer audiences can be the wake-up call that you need to analyze engagement behaviors and create campaigns to draw unengaged customers back. Otherwise, you may end up having to say good-bye to them. Unengaged customers can build up your sending numbers, but they are doing much more harm than good for your email campaigns. If you want to further cleanse and refine your audience lists, take a look at some various tactics available.
Further, Omeda’s Odyssey and Email Builder have the tools you need for your reengagement campaigns. Please reach out to the Email Success or Client Success teams for ideas and assistance at emailsuccess@omeda.com or clientsuccess@omeda.com.
