Sunsetting Policies: the What, Why, and How

This process is referred to as a sunsetting policy, and involves identifying the least active parts of your audience, attempting to re-engage them, and ultimately removing them from sending if they are no longer interested in receiving your mail. This policy has two parts: 

1. reactivation or re-engagement campaign(s)
2. sunsetting campaign(s)

First, re-engagement: this is where you check in with your less active subscribers and see if they are still interested in hearing from you. Maybe they are completely checked out, or maybe they are just taking a short break (and/or maybe you need to adjust your sending frequency). 

Then, sunsetting: If those subscribers do not interact with your reactivation email after a designated period of time, it may be time to remove them from sending and add them to your internal “do not send” lists. Ideally, these two steps are done together in one email automation. 

There are a number of reasons why your subscribers could disengage, and they differ depending on the methodology. However, the most frequently cited reasons are: 

• emailing too often
• not providing enough value/relevance, or sending unexpected content
• not emailing enough/they’ve forgotten who you are

Whatever the reason, inactive recipients actually damage your sender reputation AND end up costing you money, so this policy is well worth the effort. A sunsetting policy keeps your overall audience health in good shape, and prioritizes the quality of your list over the quantity. 

Who should have a sunsetting policy, and why is it necessary? 

Deliverability experts treat a sunsetting policy as a best practice - like setting up authentication on sending domains, or using personalization in emails. And because the vast majority of deliverability issues boil down to data hygiene problems, every company* should have a sunsetting policy to help address this - but unfortunately, most do not. Some of our biggest and best senders have a sunsetting flow set up to automate list hygiene maintenance, and they’re better for it. Even if the campaign sends only intermittently or to a handful of subscribers, it is still worth having. However, you should definitely have a sunsetting policy if…

• You are consistently not reaching the inbox.
• You have high spamtrap hits or complaints, leading to high spam placement with MBPs.
• Your deliverability team is yelling at you.
• You are seeing poor engagement (low opens, clicks) or bad deliverability metrics (high deferrals, bounces).
• Your domains are often ending up on blocklists.
• A large share of your audience has an engagement score of 0s and 1s.
• You don't use double opt-in (DOI), validate addresses, or catch typos at signup, or you collected your list through non-compliant means.

Without a sunsetting policy, you can expect spamtrap hits, bounces, spam complaints, and ultimately lower inbox placement. Your subscribers will no longer be engaged, meaning they will not bring you any value from the email channel. That means it is time to do some cleaning!

* = Very few companies should abstain from having a sunsetting policy. For example, a sunsetting policy should not be used for transactional mail, or any mail that must be sent.

A Getting Started Checklist

1. List segmentation: Building cohorts

One of the first things we recommend doing is creating different segments of your list to differentiate between the super inactives (straight to suppression) versus previously-engaged-but-quiet parts of your audience. Start by making a segment of people who (using AND):

• Have Engagement Score = 0
• Have not engaged in 6-24 months (assuming you are sending during that time)
• Have a declining Engagement Trend

This particular segment of subscribers should likely be moved straight to an internal suppression list. Don't try sending to them - it will hurt your deliverability and reputation, and it's clear they will not engage. This is dead weight in the list and it is providing no value. This should also help to remove some spam traps from the list (although certainly not all). Some of our clients have already taken these steps and seen a massive improvement in their deliverability metrics over the following years. For example, Notino was able to save $30k in just the first year after pruning their list of inactive emails. 

Once you've moved that first segment to suppression, build your next segment from the contacts that remain. Make a segment of previously-engaged-but-quiet people who (using AND):

• Have Engagement Score = 0-2 
• Have not engaged in X amount of time**
• Engagement trend = declining

** Keep windows of time wide for the time-bound conditions to capture as many inactive emails as possible, and cut this group up into segments. A suggested breakdown would be by recency of inactivity: 6-12 months, 12-18 months, 18-24 months, and 24+ months. These are not hard numbers and you should come up with numbers that make sense for your audience and business model. 

It is fine to simply have less engaged audience members. We don’t want to lose them in this process, so it is important to isolate people who could still engage, and separate them from the people who seem to have dropped off the face of the earth (or never existed in the first place).  Sending more to your engaged users and less to less engaged users will improve positive metrics, improve deliverability, and reduce negative metrics, while saving you money - win win! 

By the end of this step, you should have broken your list up into a few groups: people who should be moved straight to suppression, and 3-4 subgroups of the previously-engaged-but-quiet cohort based on their recency of inactivity.

2. Strategies for mitigation before re-engagement

Lowering the sending frequency before jumping to reactivation
For more recently inactive people in that previously-engaged-but-quiet cohort, rather than immediately pushing them into the reactivation campaign, we strongly recommend reducing campaign volume to them. If you are sending daily, change this to 1-2x weekly. If you are sending weekly, change this to 1-2x monthly. This simple step is effective at reducing churn.

If there is not enough value/relevance
In addition to the above strategy, try changing up the content - make sure you also send only high-value campaigns to that quiet cohort. Note: this does not always mean campaigns with discounts. To determine your most high-value content, analyze your reports to learn what kinds of content your audience engages with most often.
 
And of course, send only what you say you are going to send. Many recipients opt out or disengage when they are sent unexpected content, or have their emails added to multiple lists in the account. 

If these strategies are unsuccessful and you are still seeing zero engagement for these recipients, it's time to move them into your re-engagement campaign (part 1 of the sunsetting policy).

3. Writing the email(s)

• Keep the content in each short and to the point. 
• First, ask if the customer is still interested, and give them a way to easily indicate interest. If they want to stay subscribed but want fewer emails, give them a way to update their preferences. Consider adding an incentive, a poll, eliciting feedback, or talking about an upcoming promotion to generate interest. 
• Keep your unsubscribe link at both the top and the bottom of the re-engagement campaign you send. Unsubscribes are ALWAYS better than complaints. 
• Stop sending if the bounces exceed normal rates, or if spam complaints reach 0.03%. 

To break up this content, use one or two re-engagement emails, followed by a goodbye email, so three emails in total at most. Assuming no engagement from these recipients after 1-2 weeks (or longer if your audience is seasonal), it is time to send them the goodbye email. The same rules as above apply here. Keep it short and sweet: “Here's how to tell us why you’re leaving, here’s how to keep in touch.” Then add them to your suppression list. 

4. Balancing the load

Don’t skip over this part! While having a sunsetting policy is considered following best practices, if it is done incorrectly, it can go very, very wrong. There are some really important things to keep in mind, such as making sure you are not sending a high volume re-engagement or sunsetting campaign all at the same time. 

The sends from the sunsetting automation should be smaller than the sends from the overall sending in the account. You should consider what would happen if all the sends in these campaigns bounced. How would that affect the overall account’s bounce rate, or the bounce rate of all sending from that email address? Could the account handle a hit like that? If not, make sure these sends are a small percentage compared to how much you are sending via other campaigns. 

When you send the sunsetting automation, send to the most recently added emails in the database first, and work backwards. It might also be helpful, as you work backwards, to keep the "chunks" of the audience you are sending to smaller and smaller. Older addresses are riskier and more likely to bounce or be spamtraps, so keeping the chunks small will protect your overall reputation. Eventually, you can have a campaign running automatically that will send out the re-engagement email over time in super small chunks (less than 100 recipients per send).

A smaller list, a stronger sender

Letting subscribers go can feel counterintuitive, but a smaller, engaged list will outperform a large, silent one every time. Set up your segments, give your quiet subscribers a fair chance to come back, pace your sends, and let automation handle the rest. Just check in on it every so often. If you have questions along the way, reach out to our deliverability team.