Identify the riskiest addresses on your lists with an Unengaged Marketable email status.
If you've been email marketing for long you've likely been warned about the dangers of emailing a cold list. Sending cold emails is perfectly legal. So why do we care? Because deliverability.
We don't recommend re-engagement campaigns. It doesn't matter if it's legal if your emails never make it to the sender. We send emails to cold lists because we want to reconnect. In reality, those same cold emails are killing your deliverability and even more of your emails are destined for the spam folder.
Exactly how does this impact email deliverability?
- Your IP address, ISP, or domain name is on a blacklist (e.g., Spamhaus, Spamcop) which is based solely on where you're sending from.
- You're hitting a spam filter, most likely based on email content. If you're using common spammy subject lines or content that's in a lot of spam emails, your email will likely get caught in the spam filter.
- You're getting custom blocked based on criteria like content, subject, and ISP. With luck, your email is delivered to a spam folder and worst case, your email bounces.
- Your emails are getting bounced. Only hard bounces affect deliverability because the address you're sending to either doesn't exist or is blocked because you need to configure the SPF on your DNS account. If contacts haven't engaged with your content in a while, it could be because they deleted that email account. Continuing to email them puts you in danger of hitting a spam trap.
At Keap, an email operations team manages our domains alongside our systems teams to ensure we maintain 99.5+% email deliverability. It's also our job to protect our users from each other and even from themselves! When our users' emails aren't getting to the inbox it's often because of an issue with their own IP address, content, or technical configurations. Even if it's accidental, if Keap allows users with poor email practices to continue to email via our servers, we put our community and our email reputation at risk.
Keap coaches and educates businesses on email marketing best practices like gaining permission to market, personalizing content, and segmenting lists. Another frequent recommendation is to perform regular list hygiene. Any email marketer knows how important it is to stop emailing disengaged contacts.
That's why Keap's product team developed enhanced email statuses and search functionality that updates email engagement status in real time. Now, when a contact hasn't engaged* within the past 4 months their email status will automatically update to the new Unengaged Marketable status:
- Performing list hygiene is easier than ever. Use the Email Status Search to find contacts who are in Unengaged Marketable status. Then decide to remove or opt-out those contacts.
- Not ready to remove or opt-out those contacts just yet? No worries. They'll still get your messages for now - just remember the risks of emailing unengaged contacts!
- When those contacts engage again, their email status automatically returns to what it was before.
- Extra credit: Use the new filters in the Email Status Search to find contacts who are starting to cool off or who have engaged within a specific time frame.
- Search by contacts' Last Engagement Date and then get creative! Send a postcard with a special offer or announce a flash sale email to those who've engaged in the past week.
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*Engagement is defined as one or more of the following actions: opening an email, clicking a link in an email, or submitting a landing page or web form.