We are setting up a database with lists segmented by country to send email marketing campaigns and activate automated workflows.
We are currently considering excluding:
All contacts that have bounced (repeated hard bounces or soft bounces).
All contacts that have unsubscribed.
In each country list, we are also excluding an additional list that includes:
Contacts who have never received a marketing email.
Or
Contacts whose last opening of a marketing email was more than 365 days ago.
In the case of the latter group, I am considering not deleting them completely, but using them in a reactivation campaign. The idea would be to try to recover them before deciding to exclude them permanently, as I am concerned that if I include them directly in the general lists, it could negatively affect the reputation of the sending IP or the overall metrics (opens, clicks, deliverability, etc.).
Do you think this reactivation strategy makes sense? Or would you recommend another approach to managing this type of inactive contact?
Hi @evs949
Thank you for reaching out to the Community!
I’d like to invite some community members who are subject matter experts to join this conversation. @Shadab_Khan@himanshurauthan@danmoyle - Would you be able to share any insights on this? Your expertise would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Victor
HubSpot automatically excludes contacts from emails if they have previously unsubscribed from all emails, that particular subscription type or if they have bounced. It is of course good list hygiene to remove them but technically, you don’t have to.
What matters more for protecting your sender reputation, in my opinion, especially if you have not emailed contacts in a long time, is email validation – using tools like Verifalia, Zerobounce, Neverbounce, Kickbox or similar. Avoiding hard bounces is much more important for email health than excluding previous bounces, as, see above, HubSpot excludes those automatically.
I would especially do this with the inactive contacts before your re-engagement campaign. Also, make sure that these contacts previously opted in – otherwise you might get spam complaints and unsubscribes along with hard bounces which all hurt your sender reputation.
You also might want to re-engage in small batches (e.g. start with 100 contacts instead of 1,000 or 10,000) to gauge how the recipients react and whether the risk (damage to reputation) is worth the reward (a few, potentially hesitant, re-engaged contacts).
+1 for everything @karstenkoehler says here, @evs949. I’ve done similar campaigns for reactivation and the smaller rounds are much better for testing efforts.