Retiring inactive or unengaged subscribers

One measure of the health of a mailing list is how engaged the subscribers are with the content that is sent to them. By "engaged", we mean how often your subscribers open or click on the emails you send them, versus leaving them untouched in their inbox. You will find that some of your subscribers are more engaged than others. From time to time, you may want to remove unengaged subscribers from your list. This can be a good idea for several reasons:

• Saves email credits by not sending email to people who no longer open your emails
• Prevents spam complaints from unengaged subscribers
• Prevents hard bounces if the unengaged email addresses end up turning into deactivated mailboxes

There are a few different ways you can identify inactive or unengaged subscribers:

Get Info Window

Switch to the Addresses tab, select an address in your list, and click the Get Info button in the toolbar. You'll see complete history of each email campaign that has been sent to that recipient, as well as any opens or clicks for that subscriber. You can use that information to determine if the subscriber is active or not.

Address Table Column

You can reveal some extra columns in the addresses table that will help you gauge how active a subscriber is. Choose Addresses > Show Columns from the menu bar at the top of the screen and select one or more of the following:

• Number of Emails Sent
• Number of Emails Opened
• Number of Emails Clicked
• Email Open Rate
• Email Click Rate
• Date of Most Recent Open
• Date of Most Recent Click
• Date of Most Recent Email Sent

You can also sort the table by any of these columns by clicking the column header at the top of the table.

Find Addresses Matching Rules

You can use Direct Mail's Find Addresses Matching Rules feature to identify those subscribers that are no longer active:

What to do with Unengaged Subscribers

How you handle these inactive subscribers is up to you. You can:

• Mark them as "unsubscribed". Choose Addresses > Mark as Unsubscribed from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
• Move them into a new address group (for example, a group named "inactive subscribers")
• Delete them from your list