B2B marketers who engage in email marketing should consider a recent Responsys study which found that more than 50 percent of companies send emails to accounts that have been inactive for more than three years.

The study looked at how 100 major retailers managed inactive subscribers to help companies define, re-engage and re-permission inactive subscribers, eliminate the remainder and achieve better overall return on email marketing tactics, according to the company's site.

Researchers subscribed to the email programs of more than 100 major retailers using fictional personas, initially opening all emails but then stopping for a 40-month period.

What they found was that 54 percent of companies were still sending emails to the inactive account, 31 percent did so with no frequency reduction while 23 percent continued, but with reduced frequency.

"If over 50 percent of an email distribution list has not clicked or opened a single email in one year, major ISPs will filter all the incoming email to a junk folder, even those messages going to engaged subscribers," said Heather Goff, Senior Deliverability Consultant at Responsys.

Kevin Senne, director of deliverability & ISP relations added that continued emails to disinterested subscribers places a brands' reputation in jeopardy and increases the chances that the email address gets converted into a "spam trap." 

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