The specific amount of time you choose to set up your account can range from a few weeks to a few months - it depends on your industry and the email program you use. Everyone wants better deliverability, and it is a worthy goal. When messages do not reach your clients' inboxes, you miss out on an opportunity to connect with your customers.
By taking care of email sun-setting, you will get rid of spam traps, improve deliverability, and list integrity, which is one of the primary keys to success in email marketing. Sun-setting is an excellent and powerful way to address any specific email delivery problems.
Sunset Policy
We recommend you start using a "Sunset policy" for your recipients. This means that if someone has not opened your messages after some time, you either:
send less frequently to inactive contacts;
send one last win-back campaign to inactive users;
unsubscribe those who did not engage;
Tip 💡 The inactivity of subscribers is measured differently across brands because of the different timeframes in which they do email marketing. Below you can see our recommendation for the inactive segment. You can adjust timeframes according to your business strategies.
If you get nothing from such contacts after the re-engagement campaign, it is time to remove those email addresses from your contact list.
Tip 💡 You can use our pre-made automation templates that include reactivation workflows for your sunset strategy.
As marketers or salespeople, we know you work hard to generate leads. Deleting or opting out of hard-earned contacts may seem illogical, especially when there are many excuses like "What if they open the next email they receive?" or "What if my boss/manager asks why our send volume is going down?". However, regularly removing no longer engaged contacts from your database can improve your email deliverability. As much as you want to keep those contacts, as it seems like they may click or open your mail someday, those inactive contacts are probably harming your delivery more than providing the opportunity.
How to Sunset
Start with the basics:
Determine how long a user needs to be disengaged to be called Inactive. Though inactivity will vary from business to business, to start with, the users who have not opened a single email from you in the past six months can be considered inactive in most cases.
Determine what a disengaged contact means to your business.
Determine how long a disengaged contact should continue receiving emails from your company. The longer you continue to send to disengaged contacts, the more significant the negative impact it will have on your brand's deliverability.
Finally, decide how to manage contacts who have become disengaged. You can either remove such contacts from your mailing list without any notification or run a re-engagement campaign to give them the last opportunity to stay on your list.
Sunset Benefits
Running a well-planned sun-setting strategy can bring the following benefits to your email campaigns:
You will always have an active email list with users who are interested in your promotions;
Your email deliverability will improve - you will see better open and click rates and have greater engagement on your campaigns;
You will start sending more targeted and relevant messages to your clients;
You will maintain an excellent sender reputation by sending messages only to those contacts who want to hear from you.
Need further guidance? Our Support Team is just a click away in the app, or you can email [email protected].