Summary
Managing inactive users in your email service provider (ESP) is a critical aspect of maintaining a healthy sender reputation and optimizing costs. The ideal duration for keeping users before deletion varies significantly based on factors such as your business model, the nature of your relationship with the user, and specific compliance requirements. However, neglecting inactive accounts can lead to higher ESP costs, increased bounce rates, and potential listing on email blacklists or blocklists. A structured approach, often involving re-engagement campaigns before outright deletion, is generally recommended.
Key findings
- Context matters: The appropriate inactivity period before deletion is heavily influenced by your business type, user relationship (e.g., SaaS vs. accounting firm), and user type (free vs. paying).
- Cost efficiency: Keeping a large number of highly inactive users in your ESP directly translates to unnecessary costs, especially if you pay per contact.
- Deliverability impact: Sending emails to an overly large segment of unengaged or inactive users can harm your sender reputation, increasing the likelihood of messages landing in the spam folder or being flagged by mailbox providers. This is a common risk, as outlined in our guide on the risk of sending email to inactive users.
- Standard inactivity: Many discussions suggest that periods of inactivity exceeding 12 months for email engagement or 180 days for application logins often warrant consideration for removal, though some providers (like Google) may allow for up to two years of inactivity before their own account deletion policies kick in.
Key considerations
- Define inactivity: Establish clear criteria for what constitutes an unengaged subscriber based on email interactions (opens, clicks) and/or product usage (logins, feature use).
- Segment your list: Implement segmentation to identify inactive users and separate them from actively engaged contacts to prevent deliverability issues.
- Implement a win-back strategy: Before deletion, attempt to re-engage inactive users through targeted campaigns. This is a crucial step in a sunset policy. Learn more about how to re-engage inactive subscribers.
- Communicate changes: Inform users about your inactivity policy and potential account deletion, offering clear paths to reactivate their accounts or maintain their subscription.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often face a balancing act between retaining every possible contact and maintaining a high-quality, engaged email list. The consensus suggests that while long-term inactive users may seem like potential future customers, their presence can actively harm current email marketing efforts. Many marketers advocate for aggressive list hygiene to improve deliverability and reduce costs, even if it means removing contacts who have shown no engagement over extended periods.
Key opinions
- Varying thresholds: Marketers frequently use periods ranging from 6 months to 1 year of email inactivity as a trigger for re-engagement or eventual removal, with some extending to 2 years for product inactivity in specific contexts.
- SaaS focus: For SaaS companies, especially those with many free users, product inactivity is a strong indicator for list cleaning. Users who signed up once and never returned are prime candidates for removal after a defined period.
- Engagement first: Prioritizing engagement is key. Marketers typically segment their lists and apply stricter sending policies to less engaged users, even if they don't immediately delete them from the ESP. This aligns with advice on how long to exclude unengaged subscribers.
- Best practice: Aggressively cleaning lists of genuinely inactive contacts is considered best practice. Failing to do so can lead to emails going to spam and other deliverability problems, incurring higher costs in the long run.
Key considerations
- Engagement definition: Clearly define what engagement means for your business, considering both email interaction and product usage.
- Management buy-in: Educating management on the benefits of list hygiene, including cost savings and improved deliverability, is crucial for implementing removal strategies.
- Phased approach: Instead of immediate deletion, consider a phased approach: identify inactive users, attempt re-engagement, then suppress, and finally delete. This reduces the immediate perceived loss of contacts.
- Segmentation strategy: Develop a robust segmentation strategy that automatically moves inactive users into different tiers for specialized handling, leading ultimately to removal. This can improve gmail deliverability.
Marketer view
Email marketer from Email Geeks notes that list cleanup is essential, especially for SaaS businesses with a large base of free users who might have churned. They suggest that continued retention of such contacts provides no real benefit and only inflates ESP costs.
Marketer view
A marketing specialist from Spiceworks Community mentioned that their company typically deletes user accounts after 60 days of inactivity. This short timeframe helps maintain a highly active user base and reduces data overhead.
What the experts say
Email deliverability experts consistently advise against maintaining large lists of unengaged or inactive subscribers. Their insights often focus on the technical repercussions of sending to such lists, including increased spam complaints, higher bounce rates, and the potential for hitting spam traps. Experts advocate for proactive list hygiene to safeguard sender reputation and ensure effective email communication.
Key opinions
- Sender reputation first: Experts stress that maintaining a clean list is paramount for a good sender reputation. Sending to inactive users signals low engagement to mailbox providers, which can lead to poorer inbox placement for all your emails.
- Spam trap avoidance: Old, inactive email addresses are frequently converted into spam traps. Hitting these traps can result in your IP address or domain being added to a blacklist, severely impacting deliverability.
- Cost vs. benefit: The cost of retaining inactive subscribers in an ESP (even if not actively emailed) often outweighs the negligible benefit of their potential future re-engagement. Deliverability experts advocate for the cost savings of removing them.
- Define inactivity: While there’s no single universal timeframe, many experts suggest that if a subscriber hasn't engaged (opened or clicked) with any email for 6-12 months, they should be considered for a re-engagement strategy or removal. This aligns with advice on when to remove unengaged subscribers.
Key considerations
- Segmentation and suppression: Before permanent deletion, segment inactive users and move them to a suppression list to prevent accidental mailings. This is a key step in email marketing best practices.
- Re-engagement campaigns: Implement a series of re-engagement emails. If these campaigns yield no response, then removal is the next logical step.
- Industry specifics: While general guidelines exist, the exact timeframe for inactivity can vary. For example, a business with seasonal products might have a longer tolerance for inactivity than a daily newsletter.
- Monitor deliverability: Continuously monitor your sender reputation and deliverability metrics. A sudden dip might indicate an issue with your inactive subscriber management. Our email deliverability test checklist can help.
Expert view
Deliverability expert from Email Geeks, steve589, advises that while you might filter inactive users from regular sends, keeping them in your ESP for years without engagement is a financial drain and a potential deliverability risk. Proactive deletion is a sign of good list management.
Expert view
Email deliverability consultant at Spam Resource highlights that unengaged email addresses eventually become spam traps. Sending to these addresses will harm your sender reputation and could lead to your domain or IP being added to a blocklist.
What the documentation says
Official documentation from various email service providers and industry guidelines consistently emphasize the importance of list hygiene for optimal deliverability and compliance. While specific inactivity periods are rarely mandated by broad technical standards (like RFCs), the underlying principles of maintaining sender reputation and respecting user privacy implicitly encourage regular list cleaning. Documentation often highlights the negative consequences of sending to unengaged audiences, such as increased spam complaints and reduced inbox placement.
Key findings
- Reputation management: Most documentation from major mailbox providers (like Gmail and Yahoo) stresses that high engagement rates are crucial for positive sender reputation, making inactive users a liability. You can read more about Google Postmaster Tools to see how reputation is tracked.
- Compliance and privacy: Data privacy regulations (like GDPR or CCPA) encourage businesses to only retain data for as long as necessary. Holding onto inactive user data, especially when there's no ongoing service or active relationship, can create compliance risks.
- Resource efficiency: ESPs themselves provide guidance on managing list size for performance and cost. Maintaining large, irrelevant lists consumes unnecessary processing power and storage, both for the sender and the receiving mailbox provider.
- Bounce handling: Documentation often advises prompt removal of hard bounces. Inactive accounts can eventually lead to more hard bounces due to inactivity, necessitating deletion.
Key considerations
- Policy documentation: Formalize your organization's policy on inactive user deletion, including definitions of inactivity, timelines, and the process for removal. This helps ensure consistency and provides a clear response to internal stakeholders.
- Automated processes: Leverage ESP automation features to manage inactive subscribers, from segmenting them to initiating re-engagement workflows and, ultimately, unsubscribing or deleting them.
- Data retention laws: Consult legal or compliance teams to understand specific data retention requirements or prohibitions relevant to your industry and geographical location. The GDPR for example, has strong data minimization principles.
- User experience: Ensure that the process for informing users of impending deletion and offering options to stay active is transparent and user-friendly. This can involve sending notices, which is a common practice in user lifecycle management.
Technical article
From RFC 5321 (SMTP), it's understood that while there's no direct instruction on list cleaning, the protocol's reliance on timely delivery implies that maintaining accurate recipient lists is vital to prevent unnecessary bounces and system load. Inactive addresses create noise.
Technical article
Google's Postmaster Tools documentation implicitly encourages list hygiene by providing data on spam rates and domain reputation. A high spam rate is often correlated with sending to unengaged or old email addresses, indicating that removing inactive users is beneficial for your sender reputation.
Related resources
5 resources
Related pages
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Email marketing best practices for unengaged subscribers: opt-out, suppression, or re-engagement?
How should I define unengaged subscribers for removal from my email list?
What is the risk of sending email to inactive users?
Should I unsubscribe inactive users and what are the best practices?
What is the best way to convince management not to email inactive subscribers?
How long does it take for email addresses to deactivate and hard bounce due to inactivity?
Spam traps: what they are and how they work
