You might be wondering which contacts are no longer bringing value to your business. The good news is, there’s an easy way to find out. Simply create a segment of inactive users, and you’ll quickly see which contacts may be harming your sender reputation by not opening your emails or marking them as spam.
Before You Start
Segments are available on all Omnisend pricing plans.
Familiarize yourself with the Email Sunset Policy concept.
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. You need to send a few marketing activities before measuring engagement.
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 identifying inactive contacts, it’s important to define what “inactive” means for your business. This step helps ensure you’re removing only truly disengaged contacts, not customers who still show interest through purchases or store visits.
In general, email marketing best practices suggest that contacts who have ignored multiple messages over a specific period should be considered inactive. The timeframe depends on your sending frequency:
Around 30 days of inactivity for daily senders
Around 90 days for weekly senders
Around 6 months for monthly senders
However, these timeframes can vary further based on your marketing strategy. Also, you might choose to retain contacts who have recently placed an order or visited your store, even if they haven’t opened recent emails.
When defining inactivity, consider the following conditions:
The customer hasn’t placed any orders in the last X months.
The customer received several campaigns but hasn’t opened or clicked any.
Among all possible indicators, the most reliable sign of inactivity is email engagement, particularly opens and clicks. Even if a contact visits your website but never opens your emails, continuing to send them campaigns can hurt your sender reputation.
💡 Tip: Try reaching these contacts one last time with a re-engagement campaign, an exclusive offer, or through another channel such as SMS or Push Notification. If there’s still no response, it’s best to stop sending marketing messages to them altogether.
Inactive Contacts Segment Setup
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 filters applied, only fully inactive contacts will be added to the segment. Even though it may sound painful, these contacts are the best candidates for unsubscribing.
Step 1. Use the 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 filters. The segment rules should be based on your customers' email activity:
Add a group of filters with the
ANDconnector → have not opened a 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 using a 90-day period since the default rules for the pre-built segment are set to that timeframe. However, you can adjust it to another period, such as 120 days, if it fits your sending frequency better. Remember that the longer your timeframe, the more inactive contacts you will likely keep on your list.
Step 3. Once you are done, click Save and Show Contacts → Name your Segment. This name is internal and will help you identify the segment in your saved segments list.
Your filtered contacts will automatically appear below your ruleset, giving you a better idea of who met your segment filters.
Important! If you recently migrated from another service, your segment may look slightly different. Because Omnisend doesn’t yet have engagement data for your contacts, you can import engagement segments from your previous platform. Once you’ve sent enough messages through Omnisend, use Omnisend segmentation for more accurate results.
Step 4. Once you save your segment, you will find it under the Segments tab.
When all contacts are filtered inside the segment, you can unsubscribe or delete them.
Note! We do not recommend deleting contacts as you'll lose their data permanently. We instead recommended unsubscribing them because:
Changing your contacts' status to unsubscribed will prevent them from receiving your campaigns, and they can still trigger transactional messages 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 collected.
By reducing the number of subscribed contacts, you may also reduce the price of your Omnisend subscription.
To unsubscribe or delete the contacts in 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 all contacts within the segment.
And that's it. Your contact list is clean and healthy now! Feel free to send your marketing campaigns to the remaining contacts.
Have any additional questions? Feel free to contact us at [email protected] or via in-app chat.