[FAQ]

G’day,

I run an online publication here in Perth and we’ve built up a very large email list over the years. Our problem is that our open and click rates have been slowly declining, and I suspect it’s because a lot of our subscribers are inactive.

I’ve heard that sending to a lot of unengaged contacts can hurt your deliverability with providers like Gmail. Someone in a marketing group mentioned using a “sunset policy,” but I’m not familiar with the term.

Can anyone explain what a sunset policy is and what the best practice is for implementing one? I want to clean my list, but I don’t want to accidentally remove people who might still be interested.

Any advice on the best way to manage this would be great. Cheers.

[Jeff Bullas]

A very smart strategy to consider. A clean list is a much more effective list.

Short Answer: A ‘sunset policy’ is an automated email strategy for systematically identifying and removing long-term inactive subscribers from your list. It involves sending a final re-engagement campaign to give them a last chance to stay, before ‘sunsetting’ (deleting) those who don’t respond.

The goal is to improve your overall email deliverability and engagement metrics by focusing your efforts only on the people who actually want to hear from you.

The reason a sunset policy is so important is that your sender reputation is critical. When email providers like Gmail see that a large percentage of your recipients never open your emails, they start to think your content isn’t wanted, which increases the chance that your emails will be sent to the spam folder for everyone, including your most engaged fans.

Implementing a sunset policy is a straightforward three-step process. First, you need to identify your inactive segment. Using your email platform’s tools, create a group of subscribers who have not opened or clicked any of your emails in a specific timeframe, for example, the last 90 or 120 days.

Second, you launch a re-engagement campaign targeted only at this inactive segment. This is usually a sequence of two or three emails with very direct text and subject lines like “Is this goodbye?” or “We miss you”. The content of the email explains that you are cleaning your list and asks them to click a single, prominent link or button if they wish to remain a subscriber.

Third, after the campaign ends, you must be disciplined. You take every subscriber in that inactive segment who did not click the confirmation link, and you permanently remove them from your active mailing list. While it can feel difficult to delete subscribers, the result is a healthier, more engaged list, which leads to better deliverability, higher open rates, and a more accurate understanding of your marketing performance.

Cheers,
Jeff

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