How-to
Unengaged contacts
Find subscribers who haven't opened or clicked in a year, skip them automatically when campaigns send, or unsubscribe them in bulk to protect your deliverability.
Sending to people who never open your email hurts your sender reputation and your inbox placement. Each audience can find those subscribers and leave them out of campaigns automatically.
Who counts as unengaged
A subscriber is unengaged when, in the audience’s window (365 days by default), they:
- didn’t open or click any email from your workspace, and
- didn’t join or rejoin the audience.
That includes people who got no email at all in that time. People who joined recently never count as unengaged, so new subscribers always get your first campaigns.
Opens and clicks come from tracking. Emails sent with open and click tracking off can’t show engagement, so if you send without tracking, everyone who joined before the window counts as unengaged. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads images automatically, so those recipients usually count as engaged.
Skip them in campaigns
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Open the settings. Go to Email MarketingAudiences, open the audience and select the Settings tab.
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Choose the window. In Unengaged contacts, set Days without engagement, from 30 to 1,825. The card shows how many subscribers count as unengaged right now.
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Switch it on. Turn on Skip them in campaigns and select Save.
From then on, campaigns to the audience leave out its unengaged subscribers, and the recipient estimate in the campaign editor counts without them. The campaign report’s Send summary counts them as unengaged contacts skipped. They stay on the audience with Subscribed on, so they’re back on your sends as soon as they open or click something, for example a transactional email or a re-engagement campaign to another audience.
A contact on several audiences of the same campaign gets the campaign when at least one of those audiences includes them. Segments don’t use the filter: a contact that matches a segment the campaign targets gets it either way.
Compared with the campaign setting
Campaigns have their own Skip unengaged contacts setting. You can use either or both:
| Audience filter (this page) | Campaign setting | |
|---|---|---|
| Applies to | Every campaign that includes the audience | One campaign |
| Unengaged means | No open or click of any email, and not joined, in the audience’s window (365 days by default) | Sent 3 or more campaign emails in the last 90 days, and opened or clicked none |
| New subscribers | Never unengaged | Unengaged once they ignore 3 campaigns |
Review unengaged subscribers
On the audience page, the Unengaged view lists the subscribed people who count as unengaged, with Last opened or clicked for each. Engaged shows the rest. You can sort by Last opened or clicked to see who went quiet first.
To clean them up, select them, or select the whole page and then Select all matching subscribers, and use Actions:
- Unsubscribe keeps them on the list with Subscribed off.
- Remove from audience deletes their membership. The contacts stay.
See Bulk actions.
Use the API
Set the filter with Update an audience:
curl https://api.emailit.com/v2/audiences/aud_5hJ2kL8mNp4Qr \
-X POST \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $EMAILIT_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "unengaged": { "exclude": true, "days": 180 } }'List subscribers takes engagement=unengaged or engagement=engaged and returns last_engaged_at and unengaged for each subscriber. Retrieve an audience returns unengaged_count. Bulk update subscribers with "all_matching": true, "engagement": "unengaged" unsubscribes or removes all of them at once.