These are the subscribers you should stop emailing NOW.
One: They aren’t actual leads.
Two: Emailing them earns you “spam points” and causes inbox providers like Google to banish more of your sales-critical emails to spam purgatory.
TRANSCRIPT:
If someone’s on your list and they’re not opening your emails and it’s been a while, they’re just hurting your email deliverability even if it’s unintentional.
The last time that I went into my spam folder, I noticed that it was full of emails from one particular brand. Now, this is a brand that I used to buy from and whose emails I used to read, but at some point, I stopped, and I can’t remember having seen one of their emails in my actual inbox for at least I’m betting, a year or more. But they’ve still been sending me emails.
So what that tells me is that:
Google noticed that I was no longer engaging with those emails. So instead of me marking it as spam—which I don’t do; I unsubscribe if at all possible—Google decided, “Oh, this must be spam because Paige isn’t interacting with these emails,” and it was filtering their emails to my spam folder.
What this also tells me is that this company does not have a strong re-engagement strategy.
Because if they did, they would have flagged me as a lapsed subscriber already. They would have attempted to re-engage me, and if I had not reconfirmed or opened an email or clicked on something, or engaged with their emails in some way, they would have just automatically purged me from their list, right? Unsubscribed me automatically.
That’s what a re-engagement strategy would have looked like, and that means I would no longer be getting their emails.
So this happens a lot, and you really want to think about if this is happening to your emails. Because even though people are not deliberately marking you as spam, if they continually do not engage with your emails, then email providers like Google will notice that. And to improve the experience of those inboxes, they’ll send you to spam automatically.
And that’s a problem because, for one, that hurts your sender’s reputation.
So the more times you end up in spam, regardless of whether people report you as spam or not, then over time your sender reputation is diminished. This means you’re more likely to end up in spam for even new subscribers.
So that’s why you should care if you have subscribers who are not engaging with your emails.
Even if they’re not opening and you’re just sending emails thinking that, “Oh, maybe one day they’ll open and click and maybe buy something,” if they over time continually disengage, the more people that do that and the longer that goes on, the more it damages your deliverability in the long run to everyone.
So this is your reminder that now’s a good time, if you’ve never done this or you haven’t done it in a while, to go through your list, segment out your lapse subscribers, and send a series of re-engagement emails to figure out who still wants to get your emails, who deliberately wants to unsubscribe—let them do that easily—and who’s not paying attention, right? So, who’s not even interacting with those emails? Then you can courtesy unsubscribe them and clean up your email list so that you’re not unintentionally hurting your email deliverability.
What’s better is that after you do this initial cleaning to figure out who is engaged and who’s not engaged, you can actually put an email automation in place that will do this on autopilot.
So it will recognize when a subscriber has gone a certain amount of time without opening or clicking or whatever that criteria that you set—like, what is that minimum criteria?
For me, I determine it as opens, right? That’s the minimum criteria. You need to at least open an email.
So for me, I’ve set that as 90 days. If someone hasn’t opened an email in 90 days, then the automation is triggered to re-engage them to figure out if they still want to be here.
The goals of that campaign are to either have them reconfirm that they still want to be here, have them unsubscribe themselves, or after a certain period of time has passed and they’ve received several reminders, if they don’t either deliberately unsubscribe or reconfirm, then I will unsubscribe them as a courtesy.
Because if someone’s on your list and they’re not opening your emails and it’s been a while, and they haven’t reconfirmed and they haven’t unsubscribed, they’re just hurting your email deliverability even if it’s unintentional.
So do yourself and your brand a favor and put some re-engagement campaigns together, first so you can clean up your email list now, and then two, so you can do it on autopilot moving forward.
