You probably wonder which contacts are no longer benefiting your business. There is an easy way to filter them. Just create a Segment of inactive users, and voilà - you will see which contacts are damaging your sender reputation because they don't open your emails or mark them as spam.
Before You Start
Segments are available on all of the pricing plans.
Familiarize yourself with the Email Sunset Policy concept.
Note that if you have just created an account with Omnisend, there will be no data about the customers' email activity, and the segmentation rule described in the article will not work.
If you migrate from a different service, we recommend creating a Segment of inactive contacts with the service you were using or transferring the information about your customers' engagement.
Defining Inactive Contacts
Before we create a Segment of inactive contacts, we need to evaluate the collected data and decide what parameters are the most important. Regarding email marketing, the customer who has ignored many emails you've sent should be considered inactive. Thirty days of inactivity for a daily sender, 90 days for a weekly sender, and six months for a monthly sender are some suitable time frames to see if a user still wants your messages. However, as a business owner, you may want to keep the contacts who placed orders or have visited your store recently.
To start, let's list all of the possible conditions:
The customer didn't place any orders for the last # months;
You already sent several campaigns to that customer, but he didn't engage with any of them.
Although we mentioned different parameters for identifying the engaged contact, the most important one is whether your customers open your emails or not. Even if they visit your store but do not open any emails, there is no point in sending them emails. You might try approaching them with an exclusive offer or through a different channel. If nothing works, maybe this customer is simply not interested in marketing in general.
Segment Setup
We have already specified all of the parameters that can be used to identify inactive contacts. Different combinations of these rules may Segment your customers from utterly inactive to the ones that can still be re-engaged with an exciting and appealing offer.
Inactive Contacts Segment
To create a segment of contacts that didn't show any activity, you may use email activity and purchase behavior. You can also consider a longer time frame.
If you have been using Omnisend for quite some time, the list of contacts added to this Segment will be concise. With all of the rules we applied, only entirely inactive contacts will be added to the Segment. Even though it may sound painful, these contacts are the best candidates for unsubscribing or deletion.
Step 1. We'll use a pre-built segment as a base for our Inactive segment. Go to Audience → Segments → Create Segment → you will see the list of pre-built segments → Filter by Disengaged contacts → Lapsed email subscribers.
Step 2. Add additional activity rules. The segment rules should be based on your customers' email activity:
Add a group of filters with AND connector → have not opened message at least 1 time in the last 90 days;
Add a filter and change the connector between these 2 rules to OR → have not clicked on a message at least 1 time in the last 90 days.
We recommend selecting 90 days because the rules of the pre-built are set to 90 days, but you can also go for another period, like 120 days. Just note that the longer the period you leave, the more inactive users you might still have on your list.
Your filtered contacts will automatically appear below your ruleset, giving you a better idea of who is in each Segment. Once you are done, click Save and Show Contacts.
Important! The Segment may look slightly different if you recently migrated from a different service.
3. Name your Segment. This name is internal and will help you identify the Segment in your saved segments list. The best name for this Segment would be "Inactive contacts," but you can choose whichever you like.
4. Once you finish your Segment, you will find it under the Segments tab.
Once your contacts are filtered, you can unsubscribe or delete them. We recommend unsubscribing because:
Changing your contacts' status to unsubscribe will prevent them from receiving your Email Campaigns. The customer can trigger transactional emails despite their subscription status.
If you delete the customer from Omnisend, all information related to the email campaign activity and the data we've synced from your store would be removed. If you change the status to unsubscribed, Omnisend will keep the information we have collected.
By reducing the number of subscribed contacts, you may also reduce the price of your Omnisend subscription.
To unsubscribe or delete the contacts added to the Segment, you must go to the Saved Segment you just created → select all contacts in that Segment → click unsubscribe. Make sure you are not only choosing just the 25 contacts from the first page.
And that's it. Your contact list is clean and healthy now; feel free to send your marketing to the remaining contacts!
Have any additional questions? Feel free to contact us at [email protected].