“How long should I leave people on my mailing list?”

This question came up today on a listserv I’m on and I thought I’d share my answer here with you, my favorite readers!

It’s great that you are thinking about cleaning up your database!  Too many times, people never take folks off their lists and they wind up wasting a lot of money on postage and printing.

Here’s what I recommend.

Develop a strategy to get a first gift from the 1100 prospects and a separate strategy to renew the lapsed donors.  You may have to take very different approaches with these two groups. Give them plenty of opportunities to make a gift and make sure your appeals are well-crafted and donor-centric. 

After a year to 15 months, if you’ve mailed to them about 4 or 5 times and they haven’t responded, I’d take them out of eTapestry   (to reduce your cost there) but keep them in an Excel file.  This lets you refer to the list again if you need to and you can use the lapsed donors list when you are mailing an acquisition package.  Sometimes deeply lapsed donors will come back around with an acquisition mailing. 

I would watch this list closely during acquisition to see what the response looks like before I made a decision to stop mailing to the list altogether.

Do you have something to add?  Post a comment and share!