Understanding inactive email contacts
Target helps you to handle the marketing pressure applied to your contacts by regulating the number of messages received, opened and clicked, depending on the type of campaign used.
An inactive contact is a contact that has not reacted to your communications for a while.
The danger of continuing sending regular campaigns to inactive contacts is that they might get annoyed and send your communication to the bin or simply click on their "Send to spam" button.
Apart from reducing the number of communications, here are some usage of inactive filters:
Reducing the number of messages sent to inactives
Sending reactivation campaigns
Sending a request for feedback
These alternative messages for inactive contacts discourage them from hitting the spam button as well as encourage them to react when they receive a message of a different type than usual.
Using filters for managing marketing pressure
You can use filters to exclude contacts who have received too many messages, either globally or within a specific category of campaigns.
Here are the various segmentation options available to manage the marketing pressure:
Number of messages received, opened, clicked
Emails opened within last 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 12 months
Length of time present within the database (creation date)
Number of clicks
Clicks within 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 12 months
Mixing all these criteria allows you to categorize your contacts by reactivity.
Basic use cases
Basic filtering – Inactive 30 days
The contacts that were inactive for 30 days did not open an email in the last month.
Because openings can be counted only when images are downloaded, it is possible that clicks happen when images are not loaded. The first image displays the filter used.
Now the recommended way to exclude the inactive contacts is when selecting the initial population for a campaign, clicking the minus sign button to the right of the filter to exclude inactive contacts.Number of messages sent
When combining ad-hoc campaigns with periodic or trigger campaigns, you might not control the number of messages a single contact receives.
You can exclude from your campaigns the contacts that have received too many messages.
See the second and third images for :More than 3 emails from the "Promotions" category in the last 7 days
10 or more messages in 30 days
Excluding inactive contacts by campaign category
Let us assume we are sending campaigns with 2 categories: Transactional and Promotions.
We want to make sure that inactive contacts receive transactional messages, such as account-related information or order confirmation. We will then only verify the activity on the promotions category to send them a message asking if we are sending too many messages, and requesting to update their subscription preferences.
We will filter contacts that did not open or click in the "Promotions" category exclusively, in the last 30 days.