How to clean my list

Hello,

Is there an easy way to run a report and find my inactive subscribers? I do not want to run an automation now - which would be after the fact. I have 9K subscribers. How do I know which ones are in-active? I want to find all subscribers that have not opened and/or clicked on an email prior to September 1st?

Thanks,
Chris

Never mind. Found via help with Live Chat;

  • Go to Lists
  • Click the down arrow next to the list you want to clean up and select “Engagement Management”
  • Now click on “View Cleanup Options” (next to the list you want to clean up)
  • In there you will have the option to remover contacts/subscribers that never engaged with your emails (never opened) or contacts/subscribers that did not engaged with any email in the past 3, 6, 12 or 24 months.
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Unless I am missing something, these options are dangerous. I am adding new subscribers daily. I would not want to remove some of the newer ones who have not yet engaged. I would rather have the option of removing contacts added before a certain date, say 90 days ago, that have never engaged.

2 Likes

I agree. At this time, it worked for me since I haven’t been actively adding new emails. Looking at adding an automation to add tags for those that have not clicked/opened in last 30 or 60 days. Although, I’m not sure how to do that.

This is the 1-2 punch automation I use to keep my list full of engaged peeps. You can edit the wait depending on how many emails you send per month (i.e. if you send multiple emails a week, you might want to change the wait from “60 days” to “30 days”). Comes down to how intensely you want to groom your list!

LIST CULL AUTOMATION: http://tplshare.com/9S_V3l0

And then this automation re-engages the people that have NOT opened within that time period.

RE-ENGAGE AUTOMATION: http://tplshare.com/J7$H_qW

Let me know if you have any questions on using either of these! They are great to have running in the backend all of the time!

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Thank you! On the re-engage link I get “template not found” though

Conrad

That link will show up as http://tplshare.com/J7%24H_qW in your browser window. Change %24 back to $ and the link should work.

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All, seems like there were a lot of good responses but I did want to mention that when you…

Click on list > engagement management

You have the option of removing all non engaged contacts and/or removing non engaged contacts from a particular timeframe. Screen shot link is below.

http://screen.ac/2C2O2n0B373g

but what if i want to export the people i’m removing first?

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 (this modal appears when you click the greeen “New Automation” button:

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.

2 Likes

What if you’re not sending out a lot of emails? Is it 30 consecutive days? For example if i send an email out every 30 days and someone misses that window, would they be tagged as “disengaged?”

You can easily adjust the amount of time by changing the wait condition in the second automation. You can make it 90 or 120 days, or whatever makes sense for your company. Also, you can take visits to your website into account so you’re not just relying on clicks.

Try this one, Robert: http://tplshare.com/J7$H_qW

@photographicelements you can use email list cleaning services these email list cleaners will provide you verified and spam-free emails. Even, you can check the unsubscriber list, click rate of your emails.

Hey all,

Biannca here from our CX team, I wanted to update this thread for anyone that comes across this post.

travelnursingusa is right - you don’t want to remove contacts who are new and haven’t engaged. The Engagement Tagging automations that Brian shared is a great way to track your contacts engagement.

Here’s the link to our article explaining how Engagement Tagging automation works.

Instead of using ‘Engagement Management Tool’ (it’s still a great feature but it has limitations and you can’t specify a certain period), what you can actually do now is remove unengaged contacts via automations.

The expedited list clean-up is a 3-step process where you use Advanced search to look for contacts who haven’t engaged in X time and the automation just unsubscribes them from all lists (so they don’t count towards your contact limit. For a detailed explanation, see Perform an expedited list cleanup with automation.

Aside from Engagement Tagging automation, you can also use automation to track contacts’ last engaged dates.

It’s three part separate automation that work together to keep your lists clean so you can keep sending campaigns to your most engaged contacts. There’s essentially a custom field that stores the last engaged date and there’s 2 other automations that tracks engagement for the first 90 days and 6 months.
For a detailed explanation, see this guide: Use automation to track contacts’ last engaged dates and perform ongoing list cleanup.

Please don’t hesitate to reply back out or email us at help@activecampaign.com if you have any further questions.