What percentage of your contacts are unengaged?

[DCorr]

I'm interested in knowing what percentage of your contacts are unengaged? I don't have any data or benchmark to measure my company's contact list performance (BtoB), so I am hoping the community can help.

[GRajput]

As per your description, yes we can easily get the number of unengaged contacts from last one year, two year etc. Depend on your choice and that can be acheivable by simply pulling out the list. Here is the screen shot below:

Please mark it as solved if you like the solution.

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @DCorr, thanks for reaching out! This is a really good question. I have some thoughts below, but I'm tagging in some other experts for their thoughts as well! @danmoyle @Jnix284 @franksteiner79 

This is a bit of a tricky question since, technically, you'd want to aim for 0% of your database to be unengaged and should be clearing out contacts with whuch you haven't been connecting. At the same time, not every contact will open every single email from you (unless you're providing incredible value). You'll also run into email churn for sure as email addresses are changed and retired. There will never be a perfect figure or set here, but you should be working towards having HubSpot house your cream of the crop (or at least have them distinguished from the rest of your CRM). 

You also want to weigh in form/chatbot/blog/website engagement alongside email engagement, if you aren't already (lead scoring is really helpful here). Someone may not be engaging with your emails, but they could be consuming content on the website or reading the new eBook they just downloaded. But if they do end up getting on the "unengaged" list from HubSpot, there's a good chance that what you're sending isn't relevant to them.

Honestly, the best benchmark at your disposal is your current state — there are a ton of variables that can influence your engagement (list quality, list warmth, email content, offers, send times, industry, seasonality), so you should start tracking engagement/unengagement overall and within core contact groups/personas. If you're using the unengaged contact list in HubSpot, you can track the list performance over time (contacts joining/leaving the list). 

If you feel like engagement is low, make sure that:

1. Your contacts are expecting to hear from you
2. You're providing value in your emails and sharing relevant, helpful content and offers to that audience
3. You're meeting your contacts where they are and communicating contextually, not just taking a one-size-fits-all approach

Try to get a sense for what has performed well for you historically and why that may be. From there, start testing! 

And remember — an unengaged contact is unengaged for a reason. You can't force them to engage with your company if they don't want to or don't see value in doing so. If someone isn't engaging with your emails, stop emailing them. And if you're sending emails to cold lists that have never heard of you before, expect low engagement and spam reports. I've see both of those pitfalls in the B2B space pretty often, so I just wanted to call them out!

Hope this helps get you started!

[danmoyle]

Great advice and insight from @jolle here, @DCorr. The only thing I'd add is a bit of a different tact in the percentage and whether it should be zero. To me, the CRM is where you manage all communications, current and past. I might not delete contacts, but instead use Marketing Contacts to manage the unengaged contacts. If they aren't engaged, I'm okay keeping them in my CRM and just not emailing them right now. 

It's possible they'll re-engage when they're ready. Kepeing historical data can be very helpful. This also speaks to what Jacob called out: job changes and therefore email changes. If a contact changes jobs and has a new email, it's not terrible to be able to see historical context when they come back. I've seen it rifst hand as marketing or sales folks have changed companies and come back because they loved us. 

Just adding a little different perspective to the overall conversation. I'd definitely benchmark your database and work to increase engagement rates over time.