An active email list is an essential pillar of email marketing. As a business owner that sends out emails regularly, you want an email list with contacts that engage with your content and purchase your offers for email marketing success, great ROI, and increased business revenue.

An average worker battles with up to 121 emails daily. For this reason, you should not expect everyone on your list to engage with your emails or buy from you. 

You will likely find that email subscribers become inactive over time. Unengaged and inactive subscribers are bad for the success of your email marketing activities and the overall growth of your business. Below are reasons why you should stop reaching out to inactive subscribers.

Why Unengaged Subscribers Are Bad 

When you repeatedly send emails to contacts who do not open or engage with your emails, it sends a wrong signal to email ISPs, making them believe your emails are not important. Hence, your email deliverability is affected negatively.

After some time, mail providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google will begin to divert your emails to the promotions folder, and sometimes, it goes to the spam folder outrightly.

What this means is this: when you keep engaging with unengaged subscribers who do not want to engage with you, it can lead to an increase in the number of people who will mark your marketing emails as spam. This hurts not just your email deliverability but brand perception too. And, what’s more, it could land you on the email blacklist. 

When you message new contacts and your emails are directed to the spam folder, they might regard your content as unimportant and doubt your business’s credibility. In the long run, you pay more for keeping unengaged users on your contacts list than when you get them off.

Be on the Lookout for These Unengaged Subscribers 

While we recommend that you stop engaging with unengaged subscribers in your email marketing communications, it is important to identify the types of unengaged subscribers and the risk they pose to your email deliverability.

1. The Never-Actives 

The never-active unengaged subscribers refer to contacts which, after opting to be a part of your emailing community, never opened or engaged with any emails and have never purchased your products or offers.

Such subscribers may have taken advantage of a quick promo and then decided they didn’t need your content after subscribing. It is also possible that someone else signed up with their email handles. You should delete these contacts from your list immediately.

2.  The What-Could-Have-Beens

This set of unengaged subscribers have opened and engaged with your emails in the past, almost to the point where you felt they were ready to purchase your products or offer, then they suddenly stopped engaging.

Before deleting these contacts, it is an excellent chance to try a re-engagement campaign to renew their interest in your business and get them to make a purchase. However, if after the re-engagement campaign they remain unengaged, it is time to let them go.

3. The Showed-So-Much-Promisers

These subscribers have opened your emails, engaged with your brand, and even purchased your products or offers over a period but have suddenly stopped responding. These buyers may have several reasons for not engaging, but it would be great if you knew why.

Start a re-engagement campaign and include a survey to find out what went wrong. Given their previous interest, there could be a chance to reawaken their love for your brand, but if re-engagement fails, then remove them from your list.

Why Engaged Contacts Are Important

Email deliverability is key to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Engagement keeps your email metrics high, and unengaged contacts can affect your email metrics negatively, which in turn affects your business’s email deliverability.

It is not enough to have a huge list of contacts. What matters is the number of active subscribers on your list. Beyond email deliverability, you also have a slim chance of conversions if contacts are not interested in your emails.

Benchmark Email: AI Smart Sending Technology

At Benchmark Email, we understand the importance of deliverability and engagement in the overall success of your email marketing campaigns. That’s why we launched Smart Sending, our new AI tool that helps increase email engagement to improve your overall email deliverability.

How does this work? When you send out new emails, Smart Sending evaluates your contacts and predicts which contacts may not engage with your email, using data from previous email campaigns, and these contacts are filtered out from your email list.

The contacts left out of the campaign will still be on your master list and can be contacted at any time or when the AI believes they’ll be open to engaging with your email in future email campaigns.

This innovative AI tool saves you from worrying excessively about unengaged contacts that may affect your email deliverability and the need to prune them off your list manually. You also increase your open rates and click-throughs and enjoy better inbox placement – a win-win for you and us at Benchmark.

Unengaged contacts affect your email deliverability and the overall success of your email campaigns. Manually identifying and getting rid of unengaged contacts can be a chore, but with Benchmark Email’s Smart Sending AI, you don’t have to break a sweat over eliminating inactive and unengaged contacts from your list anymore.