Stop paying for contacts who never engage

Find the contacts who have had several emails and never clicked, replied or bought, try to win them back once, then stop sending to them. Judge engagement by those actions, not by opens, because opens are mostly recorded by software now.

What a contact who never engages costs you

On a plan priced by contacts, every stored contact counts toward your tier, every month, whether or not they have read anything in a year. Dormant contacts are a line item.

On a plan priced by emails sent, which is how Email Digit charges, a contact you do not email costs nothing to keep. Every plan includes unlimited contacts. But a contact you keep emailing still costs you twice:

• Sends. Each email to someone who never reads it uses part of your monthly volume. Lite includes 5,000 emails a month for $7 and Starter 50,000 for $29; sends to dead addresses are sends you are not using on people who buy.
• Reputation. Mailbox providers watch how recipients treat your mail. Lots of mail that is never touched, and the occasional spam complaint from someone who forgot signing up, both push future campaigns toward the spam folder, including for the people who do want them.

So the goal is not to delete anyone. It is to stop emailing people who have stopped listening.

Why open rates cannot tell you who is engaged

Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images, including the tracking pixel, before your reader looks at anything. Some security scanners do the same. An open is recorded whether or not a person read the email, so a list can look healthy on opens while nobody is reading. Worse, a contact who never reads anything can look engaged forever, because their mail app keeps opening your emails for them.

Email Digit records opens and shows them, marked as unreliable. It never counts them toward a score, a segment or a goal.

How Email Digit scores engagement

Each contact has an engagement score from 0 to 100, built from three things a person has to choose to do:

• A conversion (a purchase or goal you report) counts most.
• A reply counts next: somebody wrote back.
• A click counts least, but still counts.

Activity loses half its weight every 30 days, so a contact who was busy in spring and silent since drifts down on their own. The first few actions move the score most and later ones less, so one link scanner clicking everything cannot push a contact to 100. Someone who has bought twice or more never drops below 15, because a once-a-year customer is not a dead address.

Finding the contacts to sunset

The engagement page lists sunset candidates for you. A contact appears there only if all of these are true:

• They are still subscribed and not already suppressed.
• They have received at least three emails, so silence is a pattern, not one missed campaign.
• Their engagement score is 10 or lower.
• They have not clicked, replied or converted in 90 days.
• They have never converted. Customers are left off on purpose.

The list is ordered by how many emails each contact has received, so the people costing you the most sends are at the top.

What to do with them

1. Try once. Select the candidates and add them to a Win-back list. Send that list one short, plain email that asks whether they still want to hear from you, with a clear way to say yes.
2. Wait, then decide. Give it a couple of weeks. Anyone who clicks or replies earns their score back and drops off the candidate list without you doing anything.
3. Stop marketing to the rest. Select them and suppress them. This blocks marketing email only and can be reversed; receipts, password resets and other app email still reach them. The contact stays in your account, costing nothing, in case they come back through a purchase or a new signup.

The ones you never have to handle

Some addresses take themselves off. A hard bounce or a spam complaint adds the address to your do-not-send list for all mail, marketing and app email alike, and it stays there. An unsubscribe blocks marketing only, so a customer who opts out of your newsletter still gets their receipt.

Pruning by behaviour is what keeps the rest of your list landing in the inbox. For how pricing by emails sent compares with pricing by contacts, read Pay for emails you send, not contacts you keep, or see current plans on the pricing page.