When addressing an email to be sent you have the recommended option to exclude inactive contacts from the send out. What is an inactive email address and why should you stop sending to these contacts? Read further to find out.
What is an inactive email address?
In short, an inactive email address is a fully functional email address that never engages (opens or clicks) with your emails. These are the recipients that would normally unsubscribe to your emails but never bothers to do so. They just keep ignoring or just deleting your emails.
At eMarketeer we flag your contacts as “Inactive recipients” when they have not interacted (opened or clicked) with any of your emails for 12 months.
As soon as someone engaged with one of your emails, they will be treated as active again.
When you address an email you have the option to include or exclude inactive recipients.
Why should you exclude inactive recipients
If someone does not listen to you. Should you keep talking? Or should you consider a different approach?
The large email services that people use for email (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc) prevents spam by monitoring sender identity, bounces, complaints and all of the obvious signs of bad emails. They also monitor the emails that actually get delivered. How are the email users engaging with the emails from different senders?
If they notice a high engagement from a sender the emails get a higher priority than those emails that have a low percentage of engaged recipients.
This means if you send large volumes of emails that no one engages with, the emails may get filtered or categorized as low priority.
What should you do with your inactive recipients?
In the contact filter you can find “Delivery” -> “Email” -> “Deliverable but unengaged”. Use this to list all your inactive recipients.
For these contacts you can consider:
- Create a Journey that reacts on contacts becoming “inactive”. Use the Journey to send a re-engagement email asking them if they want to stay on the list. If they don’t engage, let the Journey move them to a different list or even unsubscribe them.
- Consider sending emails less frequently to this segment and think about content that could wake them up.
Read more about best practices for email marketing