Keeping my contact list healthy

Fewer and fewer opens in your emails will inevitably ruin your deliverability, which is why you should always filter out those contacts who never open your mailings.

E-goi makes it easy to keep your list healthy. Just follow the steps below:

1) Head to the "Contacts" menu and hit "Contacts" in the list you want to clean up.

2) A page will come up listing all contacts. What you do next depends on how unengaged your mailing list is. Let's find out!

 

Weeding out contacts who never opened your emails in the last 6 months

If your contact database grows daily or weekly with new subscribers, this is how you should go about cleaning it to keep it as engaged as possible.

1) Go to "What do you want to search for?" in your contact listing, click "All fields", select "Date of the last open" and choose "dynamic". Right next to it, select "less or equal to" and type in "180" (this is because a 6-month has about 180 days). Then choose "Before" and "Today's date". Lastly hit "Apply".

After a couple seconds, the listing will be whittled down to only those contacts who opened one or more of your emails in the last 6 months (a quick glance at the lower right corner of the listing will tell you how many they are). Say hello to your engaged contacts! These are the ones who truly love you to bits :)

2) Let's create a segment for them. Just click "Save as" (upper right corner of the listing), enter a name for this segment (eg. "engaged contacts") and save it.

3) Now you need to fetch all those contacts who don't love you - meaning those with with no opens in the last 6 months. Easy-peasy! Simply invert the segment you've just created in the previou step. This is quite simple to do. Keep the exact same segmentation criteria but make sure it starts with "Don't match" (instead of "match") and hit "Apply".

4) The listing will then display only the contacts which never opened emails from you over the last 6 months. Hit "Save as" (upper right corner of the page), provide this segment with a name (eg. "unengaged contacts") and save it.


Done! Click "Reset search" to go back to the full contact listing.

You can now use either segment in your mailings. When you're about to deploy a campaign (in the deployment page), just go to the "Segment" option and choose your desired segment. E-goi will then send out your campaign to that segment instead of the whole list.

This allows you to get much stronger engagement from your messages, as you'll only be mailing your biggest fans. But what about those non-openers? Don't sweat, just transfer them to a win-back mailing strategy. For example, if you send emails daily, try to reduce your mailing frequency for unengaged contacts (dial it down to a weekly or monthly send). Also consider running a "haven't heard from you" campaign asking non-openers to click a link in your email to confirm they're still interested in receiving news from you. 

 

 

Using an Autobot to filter and win back non-openers

The really cool thing about list cleaning in E-goi is that you can easily automate the whole thing:

1) Follow the previous steps to create a segment with your unengaged contacts (ie. non-openers in the last 6 months).

2) Hit the "Engage" menu, hover the mouse pointer over "Automation", and hit "Create". Pick the contact list you'll be cleaning up and select a "Custom" automation.

3) Set it to be triggered when the contact "subscribes or is added to the list" and select the mailing list where this will occur.

4) Click the "Condition" button (left-hand panel) and drag it into your workflow, right below the "Suscription" trigger. Type in a name for it (eg. "non-openers in the last 6 months"), select the non-openers segment you've created in the first step and save the condition.

5) You'll see that the condition branches out into "Yes" (for contacts matching the non-openers segment) and "No" (for those contacts not matching that segment). Now simply drag into "Yes" what you want E-goi to do with your unengaged contacts (you can, say, tag them, move them to different list, send them a win-back campaign, etc.). Then drag a "Go to" action into "No" and choose the same condition you've set in the previous step.

That's all there is to it! This action series will be triggered each time a new contact becomes part of your "unengaged contacts" segment.

 

 

Purging all contacts who never opened an email from you

If you've sent out emails using E-goi to a sketchy, poorly engaged list, each new mailing to those people will wreck your sending reputation. Please stop! Don't mail anything else until you've scrubbed the list clean of non-openers. This is what you should do:

1) Go to "What do you want to search for?" in the contact listing, click "All fields", choose "Opens" (under "Statistics"), select "equal to", type in "0" and leave the "All campaigns" option untouched.

2) Now hit "Add another condition", click "All fields", choose "Subscription date", select "less than" and use the calendar to enter the date of your last send to this mailing list. Then hit "Apply".

After a couple of seconds, you'll see all contacts which have gotten into the list before the date you've chosen and which never opened an email from you (a quick glance at the lower right corner of the listing will tell you how many they are).

3) Now let's purge them! Simply click "Actions for this segment" (lower left corner of the page) and a window will come up. Click "Subscription status", change it to "Inactive" and hit "Save changes".

And presto! All non-openers in your list will be made inactive and won't be sent E-goi campaigns anymore.