Inactive contacts/recipients
Inactive contacts, also called sleeping contacts or disengaged subscribers, are people on your email list who have not opened, clicked, or otherwise engaged with any of your emails over a defined period of time. The threshold for inactive varies by programme but is typically set between three and twelve months of no engagement. A contact who has not opened a single email in six months may still have a valid address, but their consistent non-engagement tells a different story.
Inactive contacts create problems on multiple levels. They drag down your overall engagement rates, making your programme look less healthy than it is. Inbox providers use engagement signals from your existing contacts as a factor in inbox placement decisions: if a large proportion of your list is chronically disengaged, it signals to those providers that your content is not valued, which can affect delivery for your active contacts too. And continuing to send to people who will never engage wastes sending budget and distorts your performance data.
For B2B marketing teams, managing inactive contacts requires a two-step process: first, attempt re-engagement with a targeted campaign designed to revive interest, and then, for contacts who do not respond even to the re-engagement campaign, make a deliberate decision to suppress or remove them. A smaller, engaged list consistently outperforms a large, padded one on every metric that matters, and the discipline of regular inactive contact management is one of the clearest signals of a mature email programme.
How do you define an inactive email contact?
The most common definition is a contact who has not opened or clicked any email within a specific time window, typically between three and twelve months. The right threshold depends on your email frequency and your audience’s typical engagement patterns. If you send weekly newsletters, a contact who has not engaged in three months is inactive. If you send monthly, six months might be a more appropriate threshold. Setting it too short risks removing contacts who simply missed a few emails; setting it too long allows disengaged contacts to accumulate and harm deliverability.
What is a re-engagement campaign and how does it work?
A re-engagement campaign is a targeted email sequence sent specifically to inactive contacts with the goal of prompting them to re-engage or confirm whether they still want to receive emails. A typical sequence includes two to four emails: an initial email acknowledging the inactivity and asking if they want to stay subscribed, a follow-up with a specific offer or valuable piece of content, and a final email informing them that their subscription will be ended if they do not respond. Contacts who engage are moved back to the active list; those who do not are suppressed.
Should I delete inactive contacts or just suppress them?
Suppression is generally preferable to deletion, at least initially. Suppressing a contact means they remain in your database but are excluded from future sends. This preserves their data for CRM purposes and maintains a historical record of the relationship. Deletion removes all data, which may affect your ability to honour data subject access requests or demonstrate historical consent. Some organisations archive inactive contacts after a defined period, retaining the data but excluding them from all active programme sends.