Have you ever heard of a sending reputation? It's how email servers determine whether they should deliver your emails or mark them as spam for their recipients. It's vitally important to maintain a strong sending reputation in order to make sure that your emails get delivered. Luckily, BombBomb helps by maintaining an unengaged contact list for you. Keep reading to learn more.
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What is the unengaged contacts list?
The unengaged contacts list is automatically created for you based on your recipients’ engagement with your emails. Engagement includes three components - opening your emails, clicking on links, or playing your video. Contacts are placed into the unengaged contacts list when they received at least 3 of your emails in a 6-month period and haven't engaged with any of them. Managing these contacts is essential to keeping your sending reputation healthy.
Keep in mind, every contact is assigned a relationship score. This score can help you gauge your audience’s engagement at all levels.
Click here to learn more: Relationship Score
Why is the unengaged contacts list important?
We all know how frustrating it can be to continue receiving unwanted emails. That’s why being mindful of your unengaged list is so important. Unengaged contacts are more likely to bounce as an invalid address or be marked as abuse. Bounces and abuse complaints can negatively impact your sending reputation which is what Internet service providers (ISPs) and inbox providers use to decide whether to deliver an email to your recipient’s inbox or spam folder. Don’t jeopardize your sending reputation by repeatedly emailing contacts who are choosing to ignore your messages.
You can read more about sending reputation here: What is Sending Reputation
Additionally, old and unengaged addresses can turn into spam traps. These are addresses that internet and inbox providers use to identify senders who aren't following email best practices. Spam trap email addresses may have been legitimate at one time, but are now abandoned and reused for this purpose. Hitting a spam trap harms your sending reputation.
What should you do with unengaged contacts?
While your contacts and content are unique, and there is no single method that will be right for everyone, we've identified some best practices to help guide you while managing your unengaged contacts.
Essentially, there are two main paths you can take with unengaged contacts: you can try to re-engage these contacts or suppress them.
Personalization
We encourage you to connect with unengaged contacts in a more personalized, one-to-one way. This could mean sending them a personalized video or giving them a call. Once they reengage with your emails, they’ll be removed from the unengaged contacts list.
Re-engagement Email
If you’d like to address multiple unengaged contacts at once you can send a re-engagement email. A re-engagement email typically acknowledges that you haven’t connected in a while and asks whether they still want to receive your emails. The email might include instructions on what the recipient should do if they’d like to continue to get your emails, such as engaging with a certain element of the email, filling out a form, or replying to the email.
Segment Contacts by Engagement
Another option to address multiple unengaged contacts at once is to use our segment tool. Using the tracking history from a particular email, you can segment contacts into different lists depending on whether they engaged with your email. Once you’ve segmented your contacts into lists based on engagement, you may choose to send a re-engagement email, send different content to different segments, or suppress certain segments. Check out this article for the instructions on segmenting:
Suppress the Unengaged Contact List
If you’d prefer to stop sending emails to your unengaged contacts, or if they don’t reengage after trying one of the options above, we recommend suppressing those contacts. Here are the steps to do that:
Step 1: Navigate to the Contacts tab and click on the 'Unengaged Contacts' list.
Step 2: Once inside the list, select the gear icon next to the list name. Select ‘Copy’ from the dropdown.
Step 3: Use the ‘Create a New List’ option to put these contacts on a new list. This list will only be temporary, so the name isn’t too important.
Step 4: Once you’ve created the new list, navigate to the new list.
Step 5: Once inside the new list, select the checkbox in the column header to the left of ‘Relationship’. This will select all contacts on the current page. If you have more than 100 contacts on that list, you may see an orange button that says ‘Select all X contacts on this list’. Click the orange button to select all contacts on the list. Once you’ve selected all contacts, click the ‘Suppress Selected’ button.
Only 100 contacts selected:
All contacts selected:
Once the contacts are suppressed, they will no longer receive your emails and they will not count towards your contact limit.