There are a couple of ways to quickly remove inactive subscribers. You can find subscribers who have never opened a campaign, or you can use member-activity ratings to remove subscribers who aren't engaged. Below we'll show you both.
Remove Subscribers Who've Never Opened a Campaign
- Go to Lists.
- Select the list you want to work with by clicking View.
- Then click Subscribers above the name of your list.
- Open the segment tab by selecting it.
- Set your conditions to Subscriber Activity / did not open / any campaign.
- Choose view segment and you'll have a list of everyone who never opened a campaign.
- Clicking select visible will select all of the subscribers shown on the page you're viewing. Hint: scroll down to change the number of subscribers shown on each page if you prefer to select more at once.
- Hover over bulk actions and choose Unsubscribe to unsubscribe the selected subscribers who never opened a campaign.
If you have a lot of inactive subscribers and don't want to unsubscribe page-by-page, you can download the segment and bulk unsubscribe them.
If you're worried about accidentally deleting new subscribers, you can set the condition to "match "ALL" of the following": "Subscriber Activity / did not open / any campaign" and the condition "Date Added / is before/ a specific date / choose a date that was before your last campaign or maybe a couple of campaigns ago. This will protect any new subscribers, by setting your conditions to eliminate them.
Remove Subscribers With Low Subscriber-Activity Ratings
The other way to remove inactive members is to set up a list segment of recipients with a two star or less member rating.
- Go to Lists.
- Choose View for the list you want to work with.
- Then click Subscribers above the name of your list.
- Open the segment tab.
- Set your segment to Member Rating > is less than > 2 stars.
You can set the segment to less than three stars if you like. But, remember, a two star rating may indicate a new subscriber and not a negative subscriber. A 1 star rating, however, is considered a negative rating. See the link above about member ratings for full details.
- To see just the members who have a star rating less than your selection, click view segment.
- Clicking select visible will select all of the subscribers shown on the page you're viewing. Hint: scroll down to change the number of subscribers shown on each page if you prefer to select more at once.
- Hover over bulk actions and choose Unsubscribe to unsubscribe the selected subscribers who never opened a campaign.
Notes
Someone could open your email, but not be recorded as an open in reports, or in their subscriber activity, if they don't download images in campaigns. Here's more information about how open tracking works.