How and When to Sunset Your Unengaged Users

FEB 2024

By Jordan Moye

Email list hygiene is a multi-step process that should be assessed regularly. It’s important to clean your email subscriber list to avoid sending messages to bad or non-existent email addresses.

Is it time to clean your subscriber list?

If this is your first time hearing this, then the answer is yes.

Why It Matters

The first thing you want to know about list cleaning is why it's important. It has everything to do with your deliverability. As you grow your subscriber list and nurture new users you'll find that not every subscriber is a quality profile, nor do they always remain engaged.

Some examples are:

  • Bot traffic

  • Users who subscribed during brand moments or high traffic events and never engaged

  • Lapsed users who were once engaged but have not converted or engaged in a long time

According to this Litmus blog post, emailing inactive addresses like the types listed above can harm to your sender reputation and even hit spam traps, among other deliverability issues. To keep your list healthy, it's a good idea to clean out these "bad" profiles.

Not only will regular list cleaning improve your deliverability, it can boost your overall open and click rates. Sunsetting will also support healthy spam rates, which is even more critical now that Google and Yahoo have changed their sender requirements.

When To Start

You'll want to start by creating segments of users to determine who is considered "inactive" or "at risk." Examples of segments:

  • Error segments - These are users who have been created but have hard bounced or soft bounced multiple times

  • Depending on the ESP some bounced users will be automatically suppressed

  • Unengaged segment - a segment that captures customers who have received your emails, but have not opened or clicked an email in an extended period of time (you'll find more tips for creating unengaged segments for sunsetting here)

Once you've identified your users that are eligible to be cleaned out, depending on the age of the profile you may want to set up a win back or re-engagement flow as a last effort to engage users who have unengaged but not bounced. Users should be presented with an opportunity to unsubscribe or manage their preferences before they exit this flow.

Any subscribers who engage with a one of these flows will be moved into your engaged segments by clicking on content.

Any users who did not engage with these emails can be flagged as "sunset eligible" and can either be pulled into an exclusion segment and removed from future campaigns or flows, or fully suppressed by your ESP (suppression process can vary).

Tip: If you're not ready to suppress these users, you can test retargeting them with one-off evergreen campaigns that showed high engagement before suppressing them from future messages.

Coupon code used to
re-engage the user

When To Suppress

So what is "suppressing" and why shouldn’t you just delete your profiles? To suppress a profile means to remove opted in users from your list of sending. Suppressing a profile keeps its data, but unsubscribes the user so they won't receive any future messages from you. Deleting profiles will remove their data completely.

Sunsetting should be an ongoing process for your lists, but there are also a few key moments in which you should prioritize list cleaning;

  • After BFCM

  • Post brand moment (launch, TV moment, viral social moment)

  • When you experience at-risk spam rates or unusually low engagement

TL;DR: You should have a healthy cycle of retargeting lapsed profiles, as well as suppressing inactive profiles. As your subscriber base grows it is important to make sure you're sending to quality users to maintain healthy metrics and keep emails landing in the inbox!


Need some help cleaning your lists? Contact us at hello@fluencyfirm.com

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