I am having a touch time trying to decide if I should go against Hubspots recommendation to not send marketing emails to those who have not engaged recently.
We are in a market that someone who may have had little to no interest may have an actual interest today but if they havent opened any of our recent emails Hubspot marks them as unengaged and then doesnt send.
So before I do something wrong I am asking for advice should I send to my entire database and uncheck that box so it goes to everyone or leave it checked and exclude the non engaged contacts?
I don’t have enough context about your business and your contact lists but generally, if you feel comfortable addressing everyone on the list, I’d do so. The feature can be either toggled on/off and it’s meant to be used. Excluding unengaged contacts has positive effects on deliverability but if it comes at the price of not reaching your audience at all, how exactly is good deliverability helping you?
You can also create your own exclusion list for unengaged contacts. HubSpot calculates unengaged contacts as follows:
HubSpot’s graymail suppression feature automatically excludes any contacts who have not been engaging with your marketing emails. This feature uses the Sends since last engagement contact property, which counts an engagement when a contact opens a marketing email or when they click a link in your marketing email.
A contact will be categorized as unengaged if they meet one of the following criteria:
Never engaged with a marketing email from you and hasn’t engaged with the last 11 emails you’ve sent them.
Previously engaged with one of your marketing emails but haven’t engaged with the last 16 emails you’ve sent them.
This means you can use the Sends since last engagement property and create your own unengaged contacts list. You could make it less strict for example or apply overall different criteria.
For example, if there are contacts who – despite having received emails – have not had any marketing touchpoint (page view, form submission, ad interaction) in a long time, that could be a better suppression than just looking at opens.
I would agree that you should try to measure who you can who are active as Karsten has suggested. But with that said, I always recommend leaving it unchecked. It’s a feature whose intentions are in the right place, but is poorly executed and partially because of the lack of email tracking with all of the privacy features in today’s market. If someone has opted in and you have their permission, I would see no reason to want to suppress them.