I want to prune my list and rid it of people not interested
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Easy as, travelnursingusa -
You can do it manually by going Contacts > Advanced Search > Actions > Has Not Opened and then select the relevant emails. For this query to apply to multiple emails simple go Add Another Condition and use your AND clause. You can also make an automation out of this query.
Hope that helps.
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Hi!
Paul’s suggestion is a good one but I’d caution that email opens aren’t always a reliable way to know whether a contact has opened an email… some email clients don’t display images (which means the open tracking won’t work) and plain text emails don’t allow open tracking at all. I’d use a combination of clicks and opens to create those conditions.
We also have an engagement management feature to make this easier. If you search for “Engage” or “Engagement” you’ll see it:
Or, you can access it by clicking “Lists” in the top menu and then clicking the down arrow next to a list:
I wouldn’t want to delete those contacts through your “engagement management” feature if I have no idea how, or who, it’s selecting. I should be able to export in case I want or need to reverse it.
If you want more control over your engagement management, such as being able to export contacts, I’d recommend using the Engagement Tagging automation workflow recipes we provide in-app:
Here’s the description of the automations:
When a contact interacts with your campaigns or website they are tagged as “Engaged.” If they go 30 days without engaging, they are tagged as “Disengaged.” If they go another 30 days without engaging, they are tagged as “Inactive.” These tags are useful for analytics, segmentation, list hygiene, and triggering other automations (such as a re-engagement campaign). This automation is an essential component of “Engagement Tagging” — if you don’t have the automation from Part 1 and the automation from Part 2, it will not work.
If you’re only interested in whether they’ve opened campaigns, you’d just remove the trigger for website visits. I’d suggest that you also look at campaign clicks though because open tracking isn’t 100% reliable (if someone doesn’t display images, their open won’t be tracked). Really, you’d also want to look at website visits too because this indicates a contact is engaged too.
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Resurrecting this to ask:
Does AC not record an open when a click occurs? Even if an open is not uniquely recorded, it clearly happened if a click occurs.
Edit: I tested this w/ support, and we confirmed that clicks register as opens.
Could you share a little more about how you would set this up as an automation? I’m trying to do automated engagement tracking by # of opportunities to engage vs. based strictly on a time frame.
For example, a subscriber would be tagged as “disengaged” after receiving 10 campaigns with no open/click/visit activity instead of after, say, 60 days?
I can’t see how I would be able to do that with automation unless I used lead scoring.
Hi @riskology,
I think you are correct in assuming that creating an automation using lead scoring would be the best plan of action.
We have a few blogs on exactly this topic that I think you would find very helpful in determining next steps:
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions, but again I think you will find those blogs to be helpful in deciding the best plan of action.
Perry
Thank you, Perry. Do you have any thoughts about how to achieve this without lead scoring? As it is, that’s the only feature in the Plus plan that I would use, so I would have to double my monthly costs to get that single feature.
Hi @riskology,
Ah, I understand that.
The last two blogs I shared do not use lead scoring to achieve similar outcomes. They cover two other options:
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You could create a custom field for “last engaged” and then create an automation based on the “last engaged” fields. This blog does a good job of detailing what I’m describing.
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The other way to do this would be applying tags to contacts, then segmenting the contacts based on those tags, and applying automations. This blog does a good job of explaining that.
I think both options would work for what you are trying to accomplish. Though, I think based on what you were describing, the first option may better suit you.
Hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions,
Perry
Thank you, Perry! Unfortunately, that strategy still relies on time: “if no activity in x days, do y.” I’m trying to create a system where engagement is measured based on number of opportunities to engage that is completely independent of time.
This is kind of how it would work in real life with personal contacts. I might send my friend an email 3 times in a week when there’s lots going on, and then not message them again for over a month when there’s something to talk about again. But it’s never known ahead of time when that next interaction will come.
My friend might open, click, reply to all 3 of those messages that week. But then, there aren’t any opportunities to engage until a month or more later. And they may still be totally engaged when that time comes. Or not! We don’t know yet! We should just send another email when we’re ready and see what happens. 
But with all these time-based systems, unless you commit to a sending frequency and never violate it, then the whole thing breaks down.
So, I’m trying to build automation that can measure engagement and make decisions about what to do with disengaged folks without worrying how many days it’s been since I sent them an email.
Not to mention, different parts of my list get different emails on different schedules (or no schedule at all).
Based on those criteria, it seems lead scoring is an absolute necessity to make that happen, though I can’t tell for sure that even lead scoring would get me there.
Thanks for entertaining my manifesto!
P.S. For all its flaws, Mailchimp actually does this automatically in a very elegant way. They have a 5-stars system. Each member gets a 2 star rating when they join your list, and then they ascend/descend based on how they interact with the messages you send them. Doesn’t matter how often you send to them, it just looks at what they’ve done with the opportunities they’ve had to do something.
Not a problem @riskology!
Unfortunately, then I think lead scoring would be the way to go here. However, I would recommend submitting your idea so the team can take it into consideration when making updates to the platform.
Perry
Hello
So there is no simple way to create a selection:
- people who open in the laste xx days ?
I know I’m late to the game replying to this one, but the time tag approach works well. The basic approach is that every week/month the contact record is updated with a tag showing when they last opened an email or clicked on a link. Then when do open an email or click on a link the current time tag is removed and they start at the beginning again. After a while you have a list of contact with a tag called something like “90 Days since last open” so you can then investigate. As mentioned earlier opens are not guarenteed by link clicks or website visits are so you could use this instead.
Hi there, Amy from ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Team. We’re just refreshing our forum page and I wanted to add some help here for anyone who comes across this page/question/post.
You will need to use the Advanced Search function with the following conditions:
Has been sent Campaign 1 > select a date range
AND
Hasn’t opened Campaign 1 > select a date range
OR
Has been sent Campaign 2 > select a date range
AND
Hasn’t opened Campaign 2 > select a date range
OR
Has been sent Campaign 3 > select a date range
AND
Hasn’t opened Campaign 3 > select a date range
OR
Has been sent Campaign 4 > select a date range
AND
Hasn’t opened Campaign 4 > select a date range
This will pull up anyone who was sent at least one of the four campaigns and hasn’t opened the campaigns.
Any questions or additional ideas, thread them below!