Active vs. Inactive Email Contacts

When sending bulk email, one of the biggest factors affecting deliverability is the quality of your email list.

Inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook automatically flag spam based on list quality, so all email marketers must follow good list management practices or risk landing in junk.

Did you know: When spammers send, it's often to lists scraped from public sources or a data hack. These lists are always out of date (expired domains, job switchers, abandoned accounts, etc), so it's super easy for inbox providers to detect based on above-average % of dead emails. That's why it's important you no longer continue sending to emails after they bounce or become invalid.

Automatic List Management features

To avoid you having to do a ton of manual work cleaning your list after each send (and to protect your sender reputation), Audienceful handles all of this for you. This is common practice among the highest quality email marketing platforms.

We never delete your contacts or any of your data so you can retain their history. However, we do assign each contact a status based on factors we can see before sending and after each send. If a contact becomes no longer active, that contact is suppressed on future sends.

All the possible statuses of your contacts

Here's all the possible statuses of an email contact in your database. You can see the status of each contact by heading to the People tab.

• Active contacts are subscribed and believed to be deliverable. When sending from Audienceful, we only will deliver emails to your active contacts.
• Cleaned contacts have failed our automated email verification (MX checks, regex, spamtrap detection, and more) , meaning they are non-deliverable or unable to receive emails.
• Unsubscribed contacts have indicated they no longer want your emails by clicking a link in your email footer or their email client (Note: as of 2024, one-click unsubscribe is mandated by inbox providers like Gmail...you can no longer force people to a "preferences" page first)
• Bounced contacts are Actives that were sent an email, but returned a server response indicating they are non-deliverable. This can be due to typos, people switching companies, expired domains, accounts that no longer exist, or bots hitting your forms with bogus signups.
• Unconfirmed contacts never clicked yes on the double opt-in message (if you require double opt-in). Expect that roughly a third of contacts will forget to double opt-in if requiring this on your forms.

Why is the number of emails sent smaller than the size of my audience?

Since we never automatically delete your customer data, your Audience segments always stay intact. However, when sending to an audience, we only deliver to Active contacts within it to protect your sender reputation.

• By just having an email list and sending to it, you will accumulate non-active contacts over time. This is totally normal and should be expected. There is no email marketer on earth that gets 0 unsubscribes and 0 bounced/cleaned contacts.

However, if you're getting a surprisingly large percentage of non-actives in a certain category, it could be due to the following reasons:

• A spambot attack on your signup forms: An alarmingly large percentage of cleaned/bounced/unconfirmed contacts can indicate your forms are under attack and need extra protection from bots.
• A stale or "cold" email list: if you haven't emailed your contacts in 6+ months or have built a waitlist without sending updates, this is the cause. Email lists rot anywhere from 15-30% per year (higher in B2B where people switch jobs and emails), you're going to see much higher bounce/unsubscribe rates on your first send. Resuming regular sending should improve your numbers.
• People aren't liking your emails: if you aren't following opt-in only practices or your list isn't finding your emails useful, this can result in lots of unsubscribes. Over time, even if people aren't marking you as spam this can cause inbox algorithms to assume your emails are spam, leading to spam placement or even outright blocking/bouncing your sends. Inbox algorithms are forgiving, so cleaning out non-opening contacts and sending consistently for a few weeks can dramatically improve this.

Generally, you should expect to see your number of non-actives increase over time at a small but linear pace. If you're unsure if what you're seeing is normal, feel free to reach out to support with details of your situation.