Why we don't remove inactive people from our list

There's a school of thought that you should stop emailing people who don't take action. Many strategies exist for re‑engaging your list or re‑activating contacts — and once those attempts fail to garner opens, purchases or click‑throughs, the idea is that you remove those people.

We've never taken that approach, because we've experienced numerous cases of people who received our emails for many months — even years — and then, after a very long time, got in touch to say “I've been receiving your emails for a long time, and I'm now ready to take action.” If we'd assumed someone wasn't interested because they hadn't acted within some arbitrary period, we may never have received their slow‑burn enquiry.

The arguments against — answered

1. “Emailing people who don't engage will annoy them.”

We disagree. If they really don't want our messages, they'll unsubscribe — and unsubscribing from an eNudge email is super easy: click the unsubscribe link and confirm. They can tell us why if they feel like it, but they don't have to.

2. “Emailing non‑responders will hurt your deliverability.”

Again, we disagree. If you bombard people with emails they don't want, they're more likely to hit ‘this is spam’ — but other than that, all someone needs to do to stop receiving messages is unsubscribe. Email gateways aren't configured to monitor how much a person interacts with your email; they just deliver it.

We're not even too worried if people don't read every email. We write each one with value inside, so that those who do read are happy with the time invested — but even when they don't read it, they've usually at least seen it reach their inbox. Making your email easily identifiable as coming from your organisation matters here; the eNudge logo functionality and your subject line both help.

3. “You don't want to pollute your results with inactive people.”

Someone tasked with achieving high engagement may feel inactive contacts make their efforts look ineffective. Instead of reading the data that way, identify your highly engaged contacts, add them to special categories, send additional messages to those groups, and fewer to the less engaged.

Segment instead of remove

We strongly recommend segmenting your contacts based on what you know about them. As contacts click particular URLs in your emails, you build a picture of what they're actually interested in. Tailoring your message to particular interest groups makes your offer more relevant, which is likely to increase engagement.

And back to the issue at hand: the marketer should educate whoever is assessing a campaign's success about how the list was built, how long it has been around on average, and what percentage has been inactive for a period of time.

We'd love to hear your thoughts — send us an email or jump onto our Facebook page.