Cleaning up inactive subscribers with a segment
Major email providers such as Gmail and Hotmail are paying increasingly close attention to the quality of your mailing list. If you regularly email subscribers who never open or click on your newsletters, you run the risk of your emails being marked as spam or not being delivered at all.
By cleaning up your list regularly, you improve deliverability and ensure you only send your newsletter to interested recipients.
Segmenting by opens and clicks
Create a segment in your list based on campaign results and choose a criterion from category b. With this category, you select subscribers based on whether or not they have opened previously sent newsletters.
With option b.1, you select subscribers who have not yet opened a single campaign sent to them. With option b.5, on the other hand, you select subscribers who did open your last campaign. You can find all criteria for opening, receiving and clicking in Segmenting based on campaign results.
Sending to active subscribers only
For a segment with active subscribers, you can choose option b.5, for example, and save the segment as ‘active’. This segment is updated automatically and, at the time of sending, will always contain the subscribers who opened your last campaign.
When creating a new campaign, select only this segment as the recipient instead of the entire list. Anyone who did not open the previous campaign will not receive this newsletter. Your list itself does not change; you only adjust the delivery.
Unsubscribing or deleting inactive subscribers
For a segment with inactive subscribers, choose option b.1, for example, and save it as ‘inactive’. You can then clean up that segment in one go:
An unsubscription cannot simply be undone. For example, you cannot import unsubscribed subscribers again. Deleted subscribers can still be restored for 30 days, after which they are permanently gone. If you want to keep the data, export your subscribers before cleaning up the segment.