One of the biggest factors in your deliverability is how people react to your mail. If you’re not getting enough positive engagement, the lack of engagement can cause damage to your ability to be delivered to inboxes. 

Let’s look at a smart and simple way to reduce deliverability risks: creating and using a good email address sunsetting policy. 

Using A Sunsetting Policy Can Improve Your Deliverability 

While we know people who complain about your mail damage your sender reputation, did you know people who are not consistently positively interacting with your mail can harm your reputation, too? 

Sure, the impact is much lower than having a ton of folks complain or unsubscribe en masse, but mailbox providers (MBPs) are a little bit like our gal Roz here: 

So, like Roz, they’ll notice when your mail starts to go deleted-without-opened or there is a steady increase in unsubscribes. Over time, they might start to suspect your mail is unwanted. What is unwanted mail? SPAM, friend. Spam. 

You want to decrease the opportunities for people to go from being uninterested to being annoyed by proactively noticing their disinterest and removing them before they hit the spam complaint button. 

But note, actively removing subscribers on your own isn’t your only option and should honestly be something of a last resort. It should be something you do, but it should come after you try a re-engagement campaign, where you segment your low-engagement or unengaged users into an email campaign where your sole goal is to get them to open your mail again.  

A successful re-engagement campaign will teach you some valuable lessons about what works for this segment of users, help you tailor your content to them, and ultimately identify which folks are lost causes. When you identify those people, then your sunsetting policy kicks in. 

What is a Sunsetting Policy 

A sunsetting policy is a flowery way of saying you’ll delete the addresses of people who stopped engaging with your mail from your lists after a self-determined period.  

You know, you’re sending them off into the sunset to have happy lives where your email doesn’t clutter their inbox. A tough pill to swallow, but “sunsetting” makes it sound like you’re doing them a favor and should feel good about how much care you’re giving them.  

And, by calling this a “policy,” it should be how you consistently operate at your organization, rather than being a chore you do one or two times per year. 

What is a GOOD Sunsetting Policy? 

To be considered a good policy for both you and your subscribers, you need to do some upfront work. Your first step is to determine what your organization considers “unengaged,” because to you, no opens in three months may not be a big deal, but to another person reading this, three months could be a major issue. 

Define your threshold by looking at these key indicators: 

Your business model 
How long is your buying cycle? If you are in CPG, you’re going to send much more frequently (e.g. supply fulfillment, sales) than someone in the auto industry (who is only advertising new cars, reminding you to get your oil checked, etc.) so your sunsetting policy would be much shorter than theirs.  

Your email goals 
Think about your general view on email and how you want it to operate within your business. How do these folks factor into that view?  

First, look at the at-risk list holistically: Are you in nurture mode with them, attempting to get your first sale, or are these people who engage with your brand in other channels or are frequent purchasers? Having more clarity about their overall attributes outside of email will make it easier for you to understand how they should factor into your specific email goals. 

Do some digging into your email performance analysis to uncover how long it’s been since they last engaged with your email and what type of engagement it was, like an open or click.  

Once you understand their email activity, don’t forget to investigate whether these folks are visiting the website, making purchases, or doing things outside of email. A subject line of “40% off today only” could entice them to go directly to the site to shop, and the missed open isn’t necessarily a failure. It’s just an indirect success! 

After doing this, you can create scenarios in which you decide someone is truly “unengaged,” such as: 

• They opened zero emails from you in the last 90 days (this could be enough!) 

• They opened one email from you in the last 90 days, and they do not visit the website 

• They opened and clicked on one email in the last 90 days, but did not make any purchases 

On a rolling basis, remove anyone who meets your “unengaged” criteria. Like we mentioned, this should be a regular occurrence; at least every month, ideally weekly, to make sure your lists are as clean as possible. 

How Can a Sunsetting Policy Improve Deliverability? 

Like we mentioned earlier, sunsetting unengaged addresses should be your choice when you can’t find any other way to get these recipients to engage. The fact is, a lack of engagement isn’t necessarily damaging, so as long as you’re not getting complaints, it shouldn’t cause too much harm to email someone who isn’t opening your mail.  

However…Mailbox providers take their cues from their users. If they see a domain or IP with consistent positive interaction, they’re more likely to deliver that mail to their users. If they’re seeing low to no engagement from a big chunk of someone’s recipients, they’ll begin to believe there’s a (negative) reason there is no engagement and start to filter the mail to the spam folder. 

By removing addresses without engagement, you reduce the risk of two signals that can truly harm your deliverability. 

First, sunsetting can lower the likelihood an address becomes inactive and will hard-bounce. Hard bounces are a decidedly negative signal, and how long an address can go without activity before becoming “inactive” varies, so removing addresses before the MBP shuts them down is a safer bet than waiting for a bounce. 

Secondly…well, people have bad days. If you catch an uninterested recipient at the wrong moment, you might have sent the email that breaks the camel’s back and instead of deleting without reading, they might smash the complaint button instead. We know very well how damaging spam complaints can be. 

On the positive side, by removing addresses without positive engagement, you help tip the scales of engagement in your favor. Sending mail to less people might sound scary, but a smaller distribution with a higher instance of positive engagement will send a better message to MBPs than a huge distribution with a low rate of engagement. 

Think about it. What’s better: 100 emails sent and 90 opened or 1000 emails sent and 90 opened? Curate! 

Goodnight, Email 

While unengaged recipients are generally harmless, the longer they stay on your list, the higher the risk they’ll take a turn toward the negative with a complaint, a hard bounce, or simply sending the wrong message to eagle-eyed, user-experience-obsessed MBPs.  

When all else fails, a consistent and strategic sunsetting policy can help you cull addresses before they opt themselves out in a way damaging to your deliverability.  

As always, our overall message to you is to keep a close eye on your email performance. If you’re not able to get a good sense of which recipients are at risk and should be re-engaged or ultimately deleted, consider taking a look at our SocketLabs Spotlight email analytics. Not only will you get an overall sense of your engagement, but we even provide recipient-level information so you can make the most informed decisions possible. It’s also free for 90 days, so what are waiting for? Let’s get started!