How does sending email to inactive contacts affect deliverability?

Email marketer from HubSpot explains that regularly cleaning your email list and removing inactive subscribers is crucial for maintaining good deliverability. Sending to disengaged contacts increases bounce rates and spam complaints, which can harm your sender reputation.

Email marketer from Campaign Monitor shares to monitor engagement. Sending email to contacts who are not engaged will hurt your deliverability and cause your emails to land in the spam folder.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares they work with frequency policies that will gradually slow down mail touch points if engagement drops and vice versa if they pick up again. It becomes a scale instead of in/out and it magically takes care of people on extended holidays, full inboxes, absence through illness etc.

Email marketer from ActiveCampaign suggests that sending to inactive subscribers without a re-engagement strategy will likely damage your sender reputation. They advise implementing re-engagement campaigns to try and revive interest before removing inactive contacts.

Email marketer from Reddit shares that consistently sending to a large segment of inactive users will definitely hurt your deliverability over time. ISPs see low engagement as a sign you're sending unwanted email.

Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that it’s important to consider the number of recipients when sending to inactive contacts. They advise mixing in a small number of inactives with the regular, engaged stream to minimize negative impact.

Email marketer from Email on Acid shares that one of the consequences of not cleaning up your email list (and thus sending to inactive accounts) is "email list fatigue" where the recipients don't engage with your emails any more which lowers your overall score.

Email marketer from Email Marketing Forums explains that a high percentage of inactive users can lead to increased spam complaints, potentially resulting in your IP address or domain being blacklisted. Blacklisting severely impacts deliverability.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's blog responds that sending to inactive subscribers can significantly lower your engagement rates (opens, clicks). Low engagement signals to ISPs that your emails are not wanted, leading to placement in the spam folder.

Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests aiming for <=1% ‘high risk recipient mails’ unscientifically, even if it takes weeks to reach them all.

Email marketer from Litmus answers that if you can segment your active from inactive it will benefit you. One, it means more emails are being sent to people who want them (and are therefore more likely to open, click, and engage) which boosts your sender reputation. And two, it means your messages are less likely to be marked as spam.

Expert from Spam Resource shares that one of the issues of not sending to dormant accounts is increased spam complaints, decreased engagement, and increased blocking can be expected.

Expert from Email Geeks shares that the idea of marking inactive addresses came from multiple places: 1) Some people say sending mail to inactive addresses was a way to delivery pain - and it is but it got twisted over time and was never intended to mean things like one month. 2) Out and out spammers who are buying / scraping / using co-reg / machine generating email addresses in such quantities that it makes sense to just drop any address that doesn’t respond in the first week or 10 days or 30 days. 3) People who think “a little list hygiene is good so more must be better!”

Expert from Email Geeks explains the concerns with mailing to inactive addresses which are: 1. The address is dead and the person doesn’t use it any more. This is a minor negative hit against you in terms of reputation. 2. The address isn’t dead and the recipient doesn’t want your mail or doesn’t remember you or doesn’t remember signing up, then they report your mail as spam. This is a major negative hit against you in terms of reputation. 3. The address is dead and has been repurposed as a spam trap. This is a major negative hit against you in terms of reputation.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that dead addresses do accumulate over time, but you don’t need to so aggressively remove them - the ISP itself doesn’t treat an address is “dead” until someone has not logged into it for months and months.

Expert from Email Geeks suggests mitigating the risk of recipients reporting you as spam by carefully re-introducing yourself and explaining why you’re contacting them again after so long. Sending low volumes over time can minimize the risk of hitting dead addresses or spam traps.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains that the primary reason not to send email to inactive recipients is that it can impact your reputation. If you are sending to people who aren't opening or clicking, the mailbox providers notice, and begin to filter your mail.

Expert from Email Geeks questions why contacts are being marked as inactive after only one month, suggesting it's too aggressive.

Documentation from Google explains that sending mail to inactive users can negatively impact your sender reputation. If users frequently mark your messages as spam, or don't engage with them, Google’s spam filters learn to classify your messages as spam.

Documentation from SparkPost answers that engagement is a crucial factor for deliverability. Sending emails to a large segment of inactive users will likely drag down your overall engagement metrics, leading ISPs to negatively assess your sending reputation.

Documentation from SendGrid emphasizes that engaging only with active and engaged subscribers is key to maintaining a high deliverability rate. Sending to inactive users leads to lower engagement metrics and increased spam complaints, which negatively impact sender reputation.

Documentation from Mailchimp shares that emailing inactive subscribers can hurt deliverability. Inactive subscribers are more likely to mark emails as spam, which damages sender reputation and increases the likelihood that future emails will be filtered as spam.