In this guide, you will learn a step-by-step process to create a segment of invalid and inactive email addresses. By creating such a segment, you can avoid sending emails to unengaged email addresses. This in turn, keeps your bounce and spam rate low, leading to higher deliverability and sender reputation. 

Moreover, a clean and verified email list is cost-efficient, as it minimizes resources wasted on sending emails to inactive or invalid addresses, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.

Creating segment of unengaged email addresses

To create a segment for filtering unengaged profiles, navigate to the segments tab and click on the option to create a new segment. Then, choose the "Action with user properties" option to create the segment. Make sure to set "group conditions" to "all rules must satisfy." Now add the following conditions:

1. Received at least 5 emails in the last 90 days

At first, we have to make sure we are only including the profiles which have received at least a few emails. Add a minimum of 5 received emails in the last 90 days as a starting point for this condition. Feel free to adjust this number based on your specific email frequency and the nature of the products you offer. If you send emails daily, consider setting a higher threshold.

Refer to the below image to add this condition.

2. Did not opened and clicked email in the last 90 days

This condition makes sure to only include customers who have neither opened nor clicked your emails in the last 90 days. This configuration pinpoints your least engaged customers effectively. We recommend using a 90-day timeframe instead of considering engagement over all time. The rationale behind this choice is to avoid excluding customers who might have engaged initially but haven't interacted recently.

For instance, if you've been using NotifyVisitors for a year, someone could have engaged with an email right after subscribing and then remained unengaged thereafter. Using a 90-day timeframe ensures the inclusion of individuals who have been unengaged in the recent past without imposing a timeframe that's too restrictive for removing contacts.

If you believe that a 90-day timeframe might not be optimal for assessing customer engagement, feel free to experiment with different timeframes to determine what works best for your specific case.

3. Users added at least 30 days ago

This condition makes sure to not include any new users, i.e. the ones who opted in between the last 30 days. By implementing this condition, you can be confident that profiles in the unengaged segment have been part of your account for a significant period without any engagement, while new profiles that haven't yet engaged are kept out of the unengaged segment.

Once you have included all these conditions, simply select the precomputed option to enable automatic updates for your segment with new unengaged profiles.

To complete the process, simply click on the create button. Provide a name and label (if desired) for your segment, and then click on save. Lastly, click on "Publish Segment" and your segment, which will exclude any invalid or unengaged email addresses, will be ready to use.

Dealing with segment containing unengaged profiles

Once you've created a segment containing inactive or invalid email profiles, you can prevent sending emails to these profiles in two ways:

1. Unsubscribe or delete these profiles:

You also have the option to either unsubscribe or permanently delete these profiles from your NotifyVisitors account. Unsubscribing option only suppresses the profiles for selected channels (email in this case) and retains their data within NotifyVisitors, but no emails will be sent to suppressed profiles. On the other hand, deleting profiles removes their data entirely. Typically, it is advisable to suppress unengaged profiles. 

To do this, go to segments > user list. Here tick mark the profiles you want to delete or unsubscribe. Next, click on the “action” dropdown as shown in the image below, and select your desired option.

If you select unsubscribe, you will be presented with options to select channels. Select Email and click on update.

2. Bulk suppress multiple profiles

This is a highly effective method to suppress email addresses of multiple profiles at once. This method works the same as the unsubscribe users method defined above. The only difference is in the unsubscribe users method, you have to suppress emails manually one by one, but in this method you can suppress email addresses of multiple profiles at once.

In order to accomplish this, you will have to export the segment you created earlier as a CSV file. Once you have the CSV file, delete all the columns except for "userID" and "Email". Then, add a new column titled "email_opt_in" and fill all the cells in this column with the value 5, right next to each email address. Finally, save the file and upload it back to NotifyVisitors. By following these steps, all the email addresses in the segment will be suppressed. For a more detailed guide, click here.