Your email open rates depend heavily on your email sender reputation. To maintain healthy open rates, it is critical to regularly clean your email database and stop attempting to email to bounced, unsubscribed or unengaged contacts.

Technical Level: 4 out of 5. 
Video length: 7 mins
Who should read this?: Any Keap user responsible for optimising Keap mailing list quality.

Before reading this article, please ensure you have read About email status and manually editing status.

Proactively Manage Email Statuses

Attempting to email Bounced, Unsubscribed or Unengaged email addresses will:

a) reduce the value of your email performance statistics; and

b) affect your email sender reputation and therefore open rates across your whole contact list (spam filters don’t like it when you keep trying to email a bounced, unsubscribed or unengaged contact – it’s not trustworthy)

It’s therefore important to proactively manage the following email statuses and take action.

1. Recently Bounced – manually edit status if it was a temporary glitch, or apply the ‘Bounced‘ tag to exclude the contact in your email audience.
2. Recently Unsubscribed – manually edit the status if it was a mistake, or apply the ‘Unsubscribed‘ tag to exclude the contact in your email audience.
3. Recently Unengaged – apply the ‘Re-engage‘ tag
4. Other email status issues – manually edit the email address if a clear error (e.g. mistyped), or update contact fields to exclude the contact in your email audience.

We have configured a Manage Subscribers automation on each Keap account. This automation triggers the required actions when the relevant tag is applied to a contact.

• Bounced tag: will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the bounced email address from your email audience.
• Unsubscribe tag: will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the bounced email address from your email audience.
• Re-engage tag (for unengaged email statuses): will send a short, text-only email to the unengaged contact. The email is deliberately simple to avoid spam filters. The email requests the contact to confirm their email preferences via a link to a landing page. The contact’s simple action of opening this email (and even better, clicking the link) will reset the email status to its original state (Confirmed or Unconfirmed) and help future emails land in their inbox.

You can view a list of Bounced, Unsubscribed and Unengaged contacts via REPORTS > EMAIL STATUS SEARCH (or EMAIL ENGAGEMENT TRACKER in some Keap versions). This makes it easy for you to apply one of the three tags to contacts in bulk.

Perform this process weekly or at least monthly – it will only take 10 minutes or so. It’s vital to maintain a good email sender reputation.

Please take a few minutes to watch this video below to learn exactly what is required on a regular basis.