What is the best way to convince management not to email inactive subscribers?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 17 Jun 2025
Updated 15 Aug 2025
7 min read
Convincing management to avoid emailing inactive subscribers can be a significant challenge, especially when there's a desire to reach every contact on the list. The immediate impulse is often to leverage the entire database for a new, important announcement, such as a rebranding initiative. However, sending to a large segment of dormant, stale, and unengaged email addresses, particularly those inactive for over 180 days, carries substantial risks that can severely impact your email deliverability and overall marketing performance.
My goal is to explain the critical reasons why this seemingly simple action can lead to long-term damage and how to effectively present this argument to leadership, focusing on the measurable downsides and the strategic benefits of maintaining a healthy, engaged email list.
The true cost of inactive subscribers
The true cost of inactive subscribers goes far beyond a missed opportunity for a re-engagement. When you send emails to unengaged recipients, you signal to mailbox providers that your content may not be relevant, leading to lower open rates and higher complaint rates. These metrics are crucial for your domain reputation. A deteriorating reputation means more of your emails, even those sent to active subscribers, will land in spam folders or be blocked entirely.
This impact is particularly acute if you are already in the process of rebuilding your sender reputation. For instance, if your spam rate reports are dropping and your domain reputation is slowly rising, introducing a large segment of unengaged contacts can immediately reverse these hard-won gains. Mailbox providers, like Google and Yahoo, constantly monitor engagement, and a sudden influx of low-engagement sends can flag your domain as a risk, potentially leading to a placement on an email blacklist (or blocklist).
Another serious concern is hitting spam traps. These are email addresses specifically designed to catch spammers. Inactive lists often contain old, abandoned email addresses that have been converted into spam traps. Sending to these can severely damage your sender reputation, making it incredibly difficult to reach legitimate inboxes. Even if your company believes it has a legitimate interest to email these individuals (e.g., past purchasers in Southern European jurisdictions), mailbox providers do not factor this legal interpretation into their spam filtering algorithms. They simply look at engagement and complaint rates.
The risk extends to your actively engaged subscribers. If your sender reputation takes a hit, it's not just the inactive segment that suffers. Your highly engaged audience might suddenly stop receiving your emails in their primary inbox, leading to a significant drop in open rates and conversions across the board. This can be devastating for revenue generated through email marketing.
Building your case with data
To effectively persuade management, it's essential to translate these risks into tangible financial impacts. Focus on the potential loss of revenue rather than just abstract deliverability metrics. If sending to inactives reduces inbox delivery to your active recipients by even a small percentage, what is the dollar cost of that lost reach and potential revenue?
I often find that a theoretical spreadsheet calculating the ROI of re-engaging inactive subscribers versus the cost of reputation damage can be highly effective. Presenting a scenario where current revenue streams are jeopardized by a pursuit of minimal, if any, additional gains from dormant contacts can be a powerful deterrent.
Consider creating a small test segment of the unengaged portion. Send the rebranding email to this small group and measure the response. Compare its engagement metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints) to those of your actively engaged segments. The data will likely speak for itself, demonstrating that this segment is not a valuable source of new engagement and carries a high risk for your overall sending reputation.
Immediate gains
Larger audience: Management might see a higher raw number of recipients.
Perceived reach: Belief that more emails equal more brand exposure.
Cost efficiency (misguided): Ignoring the true cost per engaged email.
Long-term deliverability and revenue
Reputation damage: Increased spam complaints and hitting spam traps.
Reduced inbox placement: Active subscribers miss important emails.
Lost revenue: Decreased conversions from your most valuable audience.
Smart strategies for list hygiene and re-engagement
Instead of a broad, risky send, advocate for a more strategic approach to re-engagement. This involves segmenting your inactive subscribers and implementing a re-engagement campaign. The goal is to identify truly interested individuals and responsibly remove those who are not engaged.
A key step here is to run your entire list, especially the inactive portion, through an email validation service. While a validation service won't tell you who will engage, it can filter out hard bounces, throw-away email accounts, and dead addresses that accumulated in your list due to previous poor bounce management. This ensures you're not sending to non-existent recipients, which can also harm your sender reputation.
For the truly inactive, consider a sunsetting policy. This involves sending a final re-engagement email (or series) asking if they still wish to receive communications. If they don't respond, responsibly remove them from your active mailing list. This shows mailbox providers that you are dedicated to maintaining a clean and engaged audience.
Key considerations for managing inactive lists
Define inactivity: Establish clear criteria for when a subscriber is considered inactive, e.g., no opens or clicks in 90, 180, or 365 days.
Segment: Create a separate segment for inactive subscribers to manage them differently.
Sunset policy: If re-engagement fails, remove them. This improves deliverability and reduces costs.
Protecting your sender reputation
Maintaining a strong sender reputation is an ongoing effort that requires consistent attention. It takes time to build and can be damaged quickly. If your reputation is currently recovering from a poor state, any action that could jeopardize that recovery should be avoided.
Mailbox providers are increasingly sophisticated in their filtering. They prioritize user experience, which means delivering emails that recipients want and actively engage with. Sending emails to those who consistently ignore them signals low relevance, increasing the likelihood that your emails will be filtered into spam, or worse, blocked entirely. This applies not only to your current inactive list but also sets a precedent for how future campaigns are viewed.
The stability of your domain reputation is paramount. If your reputation is 'pinballing' between high and medium, it indicates a fragile balance. Introducing unengaged subscribers into your mailing stream will likely tip that balance negatively, potentially pushing your reputation back into a 'bad' or 'low' state. Recovering from such a setback can take 3 to 6 months of consistent, careful mailing practices. The small, potential gain from reaching inactive users is simply not worth the significant risk to your primary revenue-driving channel.
A path to sustainable email success
Ultimately, the best way to convince management not to email inactive subscribers is to present a clear, data-driven argument. Emphasize the financial implications of damaged deliverability and the long-term benefits of a healthy, engaged email list. Highlight that a smaller, more engaged list is infinitely more valuable than a large list with low engagement, as it ensures your messages reach those who genuinely want to hear from you.
By focusing on protecting existing revenue and the critical need to maintain a strong sender reputation, you can guide leadership towards making decisions that support sustainable, effective email marketing strategies.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Always segment your list, separating active subscribers from those who are dormant or unengaged.
Conduct small, controlled test sends to inactive segments to gather data before making a large-scale decision.
Implement a clear sunset policy for subscribers who consistently fail to engage after re-engagement attempts.
Common pitfalls
Believing that all subscribers are equally valuable, regardless of their engagement level.
Ignoring the financial implications of poor deliverability, such as lost conversions and revenue.
Use A/B testing on subject lines for re-engagement campaigns to see what resonates.
Consider offering a preference center to allow subscribers to control content and frequency.
Monitor key deliverability metrics like bounce rates and complaint rates closely, especially after any list changes.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that there's no concrete argument against sending to inactive subscribers without relevant data for a particular list, so starting with a small segment and measuring the response is key.
2021-03-09 - Email Geeks
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that anecdotal evidence suggests sending to large portions of never-engaged recipients is a bad idea, but actual data is more persuasive for many organizations.
