Celebrate Unsubscribes

You should read this article if you:

• Have a list of contacts you suspect or know are inactive
• Would like ideas about re-activating or re-engaging your contacts
• Would like to make better use of your marketing automation platform for managing inactive leads
• Need to cull your list to only those who wish to receive your messages
• Would prefer to reengage rather than archive dormant leads
• Want to improve your sender reputation

Introduction

Beth Hayden, senior staff writer at Copyblogger, wrote, “A lot of email marketers take it very personally when people drop off their list. They fret and sweat over every lost reader; but I argue that there are many reasons why you want to celebrate — not mourn — when someone unsubscribes from your list.”

I think Beth is onto something. Not only should you celebrate the loss, you should encourage it.

Many marketing automation systems charge you based upon either the number of contacts in your list or the number of emails you send. In either case, when you send an email to a prospect that clearly has no interest in your message, you’re wasting money or effort — or perhaps both. What’s more, this inactivity could well be affecting your sender reputation and deliverability score.

In today’s compliance-driven environment, pruning inactive contacts isn’t just smart — it’s good legal hygiene.

You should ask yourself: At what point are my inactive contacts a liability? Is it time to clean house?

In this case study, I’ll discuss a reengagement campaign we deployed. The test list was small — just 2,966 contacts: 193 were suppressed as role-based addresses, 336 bounced, netting 2,244 actual emails sent for the first version. The process we implemented is worth a look and may give you ideas for deploying your own reengagement and archiving campaign — on any scale.

The campaign

All lists have a percentage of inactive (disinterested) contacts, and ours was no different. We have an active marketing list of exactly 7,000 names. Of this, we found that 2,966 had not interacted with any of our messaging (online or offline) since subscribing to the list — up to three years. That was alarming: nearly half of all our contacts had not opened, clicked, unsubscribed, or engaged in any other way. Obviously, there was work to be done, but on the upside, a little more than half were moderately to very engaged. Now was the time to either cut loose the disengaged half, figure out how to reengage, or move them into a drip campaign.

Note: Engagement with emails is measured through a tracking pixel or graphic that signals when an email is opened and displayed. This is then calculated as a contribution to the open rate. It’s possible some of these contacts had opened a previous message but did not allow graphics to load and, in that case, would not have been counted as a contributor to our open rate.

Today, open-rate tracking is less precise due to privacy changes (such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection), so click rates and engagement depth are now better indicators of interest.

Features

To execute a reengagement campaign effectively, our software needed to support:

• Segmentation
• Email automation
• In-depth analytics

These features enabled us to identify inactive contacts, automatically deploy messages, and track engagement. As the campaign deployed, these same features moved newly engaged contacts into our nurture campaigns, relegated still-inactive contacts for archival, and captured any new engagement that did occur.

(Today, tools such as HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Mailchimp make this type of automation easier than ever.)

Message

Our message was simple and presented in both HTML and plain-text formats for recipients who prefer that style. While I acknowledge that a business email sent from my Google Workspace account likely would have received more opens, without the analytics tracking of our automation platform, I wouldn’t have been much wiser. Still, if analytics aren’t your end goal — just reengagement — you might be better off sending your message through your company’s standard business accounts.

The email content was constructed so that any open or click would provide a morsel of insight into interest. The email content first acknowledged that we were tracking their inactivity, then reassured them of our intent with an empathetic statement, followed by two paragraphs reminding them of our services. To close, we offered an unsubscribe link, a link to the most-popular page on our website (our resources page), and finally, a suggestion that if hearing from us by email wasn’t preferable, perhaps they would enjoy our LinkedIn group.

I felt these three links would effectively disclose their interest level:

• No interest (unsubscribe)
• Renewed interest (resources page)
• Moderate interest (LinkedIn group)

Depending upon your products or services, you might choose different options to isolate interest levels and types.

The design of the email was simple, had few graphics, provided contact information and social sharing, and was consistently branded.

Testing

Practicing what we preach, after six days, we created a new segment from our inactive list of those who had still not engaged and resent the message with a new subject line. We use this process with nearly all internal and client emails because we’ve found that different subject lines resonate with different people and can net more opens.

We typically repeat the process every three days or so, up to five times before we call the campaign complete. This can turn a campaign such as this one (designed to remove inactive contacts) into a learning experience about subject lines.

In addition to the dwindling number of sends and subject line testing, we also tested day and time of send. As you can see in the following table, the initial email went out on Wednesday 3 AM, followed by Tuesday 2 PM, and the final send on Friday 6 AM.

The flaw in this approach is that for true A/B testing, we should have created an A/B/C split of the three subject lines and sent at all three day/times. With our less-structured approach, we don’t know whether the net number sent, subject line, or day/time affected the analytics most.

Analytics

Our analytics about 24 hours after each send were as follows:

Subject line	Sent	Date sent (+24 hours)	Unique opens	Effective opens	Clicked	Unsubscribes
Gee. Where’ve you been? We miss you.	2773	09/11/13 3 AM	35 (1.6%)	166	4 (0.2%)	6
Are you feeling cyber-stalked?	2730	9/17/13 2 PM	13 (0.5%)	21	2 (0.1%)	8
Are You Just Not That Into Us?	2642	9/20/13 6 AM	18 (0.7%)	46	2 (0.1%)	21
Totals			66	233	8	35

At the close of the campaign, 66 people opened one of the emails — who had not opened since joining our list — and a little more than half of them unsubscribed.

It’s always difficult to extrapolate meaningful data from numbers this small, except that we outperformed my expectations across the board. I assumed we’d have zero engagement, given the length of inactivity. Opt-outs were higher than expected, simply because I thought opens would be zero, thus no one to click the unsubscribe link.

The high level of unsubscribes on Friday/Saturday was interesting. Does this mean people have more time on their hands on Fridays and use that opportunity to clean out their inboxes, or does it indicate they’d received this message (different subject lines) three times and simply wanted to stop the flow?

I reached out to Michael Mendoza, CEO at Lineup, for some insight. Michael was a dormant lead in this list but one who opened the reengagement email without additional prompting by us. Michael skipped the first but opened the second email, so I surmised that he opened based on subject line alone.

“Lineup provides a CRM solution, so I do keep an eye on campaigns launched by our business associates. I always open business emails that I receive from Cyndie since I know her personally, but I tend to skip commercial emails that come from her company; these are more appropriate for my marketing department. This email, however, piqued my interest because of the subject line [Are You Feeling Cyber-stalked?] and made me wonder about the message within. Once I opened the email, the text indicated they were tracking my lack of interest, and I found it was a marketing email. I did not click any links because, while it’s true that I have been inactive, I still prefer to keep an eye on what her company sends out,” said Mendoza.

The question then becomes, is Michael representative of the names in my list? As it turns out — he is. About 2,000 of our leads are CEOs of companies with whom I’ve developed relationships over the past three decades of my entrepreneurial pursuits. Many are like Michael Mendoza: interested enough in my new endeavors to continue receiving messages from my company, but not the appropriate contact for our marketing efforts.

To verify that these inactive names are of this segment, I’d need to individually vet each name, but I didn’t think that was necessary. My goal was to enable the archival of names not interested in our messages — and I think I’ve managed to effectively isolate those.

Unsubscribes

Looking back at the data, the most interesting statistic was the few people who chose not to disengage — even though we made it particularly easy to do so. Like Michael, 31 other recipients opened the email, presumably read the message, and chose to do nothing — not even unsubscribe. This segment was relegated to our drip campaign and continues to receive one message a month. If they interact with any of those in any way, they join the ranks of our nurture list.

When we started this campaign, we had 2,966 inactive contacts. The segment today, after unsubscribes, bounces, and opt-outs, is down to 2,832. We’re now ready to archive them — under the assumption our messages go straight to their spam folder (which affects our deliverability) — or leave them in the list, assuming we haven’t yet written a subject line compelling enough to reengage them.

We’ve chosen to archive, lowering our monthly outlay to our service provider by about $200 due to fewer active contacts.

Spam and reputation

It’s easier than ever to report spammers. Most email clients include a one-click report spam button, which logs a complaint at the ISP level or relays it back to the sender.

Unfortunately, many spam complaint systems don’t track why a recipient thinks a message is spam. Subscribers may have forgotten they opted in, or they may simply be overwhelmed. Like most, we’ve know complaints increase if we send too often or if we send irrelevant messages. No matter what prompted the complaint, it contributes to a poor sender reputation — and that’s exactly what we were trying to avoid by encouraging unsubscribes. Unsubscribes are far preferable to spam complaints.

Our sender reputation is also tied to the IP address of the mail server we use. Our email service provider assigns values to our email activity, and the total of these values provides a ranking for our company as a sender — which can directly influence our deliverability rate.

As a final consideration, hard bounces (invalid addresses) can be nearly as damaging as a spam complaint. Most modern email systems automatically block these from future sends, but if not, you should manually remove them or create an exclusion list.

In closing

Was all of this worth the effort? You bet. By removing disinterested parties from our list, I saved roughly $2,400 a year in software expenses, improved our sender reputation by ensuring the emails I send are being opened, and reduced the likelihood of gaining a spammer moniker because the emails I do send are making their way to inboxes of people who want to receive them.

There are plenty of other reengagement case studies published, and I’ve read a fair number of them, but most are from large companies making grand efforts that are hard to replicate with a small list. I hope that by sharing our efforts, other small companies realize that list hygiene efforts aren’t just for the Fortune few — it’s for everyone, on any budget, and it’s a worthwhile exercise.

Today’s takeaway (2025 update)

Cleaning your list is no longer optional — it’s a key part of maintaining your sender reputation and ensuring your automation spend delivers real results. Whether you’re using HubSpot, Klaviyo, or any other platform, the goal remains the same: reach people who want to hear from you, and gracefully release those who don’t.

Editor’s note: I wrote this article some time ago — but the principle hasn’t changed. This lightly updated version reflects current tools and practices while keeping the same lessons intact.

AI disclosure: This content was originally written by me and later updated with assistance from OpenAI’s GPT-5 for light editing, fact-checking, and modernization. Every word has been reviewed and approved by a human — specifically, me — before publication.