Commercial servers manage to achieve an average delivery rate just under 90%, with less than 10% rejected and less than 1% filtered. Permission-based email newsletters are only reaching their destination 75% of the time. Only 40% of email marketers are getting their messages to the people on their opt in email lists 90-100% of the time.

When email marketers face challenges with email delivery, experts suggest the isolation of subscribers who are active from those who are not and only sending email marketing newsletters to those subscribers.

This sounds like decent enough advice, however, the majority of email marketers fail to embrace the idea of taking even one valid email address off their subscriber lists. Some refuse to remove subscribers who have not click a single ad in over five years.

The first thing you need to do is identify your target audience. It is important to have a well-defined system for identifying subscribers on your email lists that are no longer active. This will allow you to remove only those who are truly inactive and not just in stealth mode.

Take the time to measure purchase activity and interactions like review posting, commenting on blogs and frequently browsing the categories. Defining an inactive subscriber ultimately depends on your idea of email success. Perhaps you require a full path from opening the message to order conversion or satisfied with just the click. You have the final say in who is and is not considered active on your lists.

If you would like to find out more about how to make you email lists more effective, read these other great articles from Ways To Get Noticed.