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.
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.
The Importance of Proactively Managinge 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 email statuses and take action.
How to Proactively Manage Email Statuses
In your Keap app we have configured several reports to manage email status issues easily and regularly.
Perform this process weekly or at least monthly. It will only take 5 minutes or so once you are in a regular cycle. It’s vital to maintain a good email sender reputation, and therefore open rates and email marketing effectiveness.
Go to REPORTS > EMAIL STATUS SEARCH (or REPORTS > EMAIL ENGAGEMENT TRACKER in some Keap Pro versions).
In this report, review the 8 SAVED SEARCHES, following the process to apply the appropriate tags.
1. Recently Bounced – manually edit status if it was a temporary glitch, or apply the ‘Status > Bounced‘ tag to exclude the contact in your future email audiences. This tag will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the bounced contact from your email audience.
2. Recently Unsubscribed – manually edit the status if it was a mistake, or apply the ‘Status > Unsubscribed‘ tag to exclude the contact in your email audience. This tag will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the unsubscribed contact from your email audience.
3. New No List Zombies – these are contacts who have declined to receive any emails via your email preference centre (landing page). They have not unsubscribed, but that have effectively opted out of all types of emails. Apply the ‘Status > Unengaged Zombie‘ tag. This tag will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the unengaged contact from your email audience.
6. New Unengaged – these are contacts who have not opened an email in more than 3 months. Apply the ‘Status > Re-engage‘ tag. This tag will send a short, text-only email to the unengaged contact. The email is deliberately simple to help 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.
7. 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. In some cases, the email address simply cannot be sent to (e.g. restricted domain), in which case, apply the ‘Status > Bounced‘ tag.
8. Bounced Unsubscribed Unengaged – can delete – these contacts have been identified as Bounced, Unsubscribed or Unengaged email addresses by you applying those relevant tags. They also have not engaged with any of your emails in more than 12 months. So could consider deleting them from your Keap app if you wish to keep your contact list size to a minimum and save cost.
Note that we skipped over reports 4 and 5. These two reports will show 0 contacts the first time you perform this email status review process. But after running this process once, contacts may start to appear in these two reports.
4. New Unengaged Zombies – these contacts were sent a re-engagement email previously when you applied the ‘Re-engage’ tag. But they still have not opened that email or any other email. you should stop trying to email these contacts now as continuing to email them hurts your sender reputation and could impact open rates of across all other contacts. Apply the ‘Status > Unengaged Zombie‘ tag. This tag will set all your custom mailing list contact fields to NO (e.g. List: News, List: Ownership) to remove the unengaged contact from your email audience.
5. Re-engaged – these contacts were sent a re-engagement email previously when you applied the ‘Re-engage’ tag. They have opened that email (or any other email), which is great. Apply the ‘Status > Re-engaged‘ tag now to continue including these contacts in your future email audiences.