Removing unengaged subscribers from your email lists and keeping a hygiene contact list is absolutely crucial for your email marketing and automation success rates.
Why?
Whether your email software is ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, PinpointConvert, Getresponse or MailChimp, you want to make sure that you send emails only to real people who engage with your emails.
Email marketing may be at the core of your sales. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail measure your opening rates and click rates (while bounce rates are also measured along with other factors) to keep your sending IP and your sender’s email address validated.
Sending emails to email addresses that don’t engage affect your validation score. Keeping clean lists will help your emails go to people’s inbox and not to their spam folder.
In this article we will teach you how to build an automated email clean-up system that will:
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Automatically tag unengaged contacts
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Automatically send unengaged contacts a sequence of emails to check up on them before removal
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And, if they don’t response- remove them from your lists
In this article we will be using ActiveCampaign to demonstrate the set up of the email cleaning system.
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Step 1: Creat “last interaction” contact field
On your ActiveCampaign dashboard, click “contacts”.
Open any contact
Click “Manage Fields”
This window will open:
Click “add field”. We will name it “last interaction date” and create the tag LAST_INTERACTION_DATE
Click save and close the window:)
Step 2: Build an Automation that Automatically Update the Last Interaction Date
On main menu, click “automation” and create a new automation from scratch.
You will create two entry points. One that will mark a the last date of a reading of an email as a “last interaction date”, and one that will do the same for any link that was clicked.
At the top of the automation workflow, click “Add a new trigger”.
Search for the trigger “open/reads an email” and click on it.
In the next window click “campaign”.
Then select any email, any list, multiple times.
Now create another trigger, this time for clickers.
Choose any email, any list, any link and run multiple times.
Name the automation and remember what you called it:)
Save and exit.
Step 3: Build an automated List Cleaner!
How to do this?
If you have multiple lists, you will create multiple entry point triggers for each list.
But let’s say you have one list.
Click “trigger” and choose “date based”.
When defining the entry point trigger of the list, to the List Cleaner automation, follow the following steps:
“Starts” is when the counting start. You can choose 30 or 60 days or any period of time that you want.
Choose the list you want to remove unengaed contacts from.
Check daily every morning.
“Runs” when month and day match condition.
Advanced:
Segment the contacts entering this automation to be “not currently in automation” (List Cleaner), AND has not opened any campaign or email.
Save and close.
Since the segmentation is Has not Opened any campaign or email, create more triggers for more lists and more triggers for “Has not Clicked” on any link.
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Create a last “touching base” email.
The first action, after entering the automation, will be to send an email to the added contacts. The email is basically a last attempt to get the contact act.
For this article we created an email we called “Touching base”. Here it is:
We wrote:
We haven’t heard from you for a while and we wanted to touch base and see if you still want to receive our emails.
You can ask to contact to reply to the message or to go to your subscription preferences page.
If they don’t response, well… you did the best you could!
Here’s what happens next:
Create a condition “Does the contact match the following condition (has replied to campaign). Set, any campaign.
If YES, end the automation so the contact will not be removed from your list.
If NO, unsubscribe from all lists.
