Remove contacts unengaged more than 1 year from email marketing

This article applies to:

As you collect engaged customers as contacts, so do you collect contacts that become unengaged with your business. If you haven’t cleaned your email list in a long time (more than 6 months), you can apply the process below as well as Tag contacts unengaged 6-12 months for a re-engagement campaign. To avoid both processes, we recommend regular recurring efforts around List Hygiene, which is critical to your email marketing success.


  1. Navigate to Marketing and click Reports.

  2. Click on Email Status Search to open the report.
    If your app brings you to a list of search results, click the New Search button.

  3. In the Email Status drop-down, select the first four options (hold the Shift key down to select multiple options).

  4. In the Last Engagement Date drop-down, select More than 12 Months.

  5. Next, we will exclude new leads from our search. Click the Misc Criteria tab.

  6. In this example, we will use a date range starting with the earliest date of our company going up to 4 months ago, so that any new leads captured within the past 4 months will not be included in our data.

    1. In the Date Created fields, select today’s date and change the year to 2009.
    2. In the second date window, select a date 4 months in the past from today.

  7. Click Search at the bottom of the page to view the results.

  8. Next, remove these contacts from your marketing. Check the Select All checkbox at the top of the list.
  9. Click the Actions drop-down and select Update Opt-In/Out Status.

  10. Make sure in the Email Fields to Update that Primary Email is selected and change Opt In or Out? to Opt-Out.

  11. Enter a reason for Opt Update and click Process Action.

    You have now successfully removed the unengaged contacts from your future email marketing.
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