Clean your list of inactive contacts
Find contacts who haven't engaged in months, try to win them back, and remove the rest.
Build a segment for your inactive contacts (the Cold (90d) starter does it in one click), send them one last email, then remove whoever still doesn’t engage. A smaller engaged list lands in the inbox more reliably than a big ignored one.
Undeliverable addresses are already handled: hard bounces, repeated soft bounces and disposable domains become cleaned automatically and are never mailed again. This article is about people who can receive your email but aren’t engaging.
Find them
- Go to Segments and click New segment (or pick the Cold (90d) starter card if you have no segments yet).
- The starter gives you two rules: Status is Subscribed, and Opened · not in the last · 90 days.
- Watch the count under the rules: it updates as you edit.
- Name it and click Create segment.
- Click See who matched (or View contacts from the segment’s row) to open the contacts table filtered to that segment.
Read the number honestly
- Opens are unreliable. Apple Mail Privacy Protection and similar features register opens that never happened, and privacy-conscious readers register none at all. See Why open rates are inflated.
- 90 days is the furthest back an engagement rule can look. See Why engagement rules only look back 90 days.
If you send infrequently, 90 days of silence may only be two or three emails. Consider adding Clicked · not in the last · 90 days as a second rule so you’re not removing people who read without registering an open.
Try to win them back
Create a campaign, choose Also send to a segment, and pick your cold segment. Keep it short with a clear ask: a link to click, or a preference centre link so they can choose fewer emails instead of none. See Customise the unsubscribe experience.
Give it a week or two, then reopen the segment. Anyone who opened or clicked has dropped out of it.
Remove the rest
Export first if you want a record: on the contacts page, with the segment filter applied, click Export. Then work through the filtered table: tick the rows and choose Delete in the bulk bar (25 at a time). See Bulk actions on contacts.
Deleting is not unsubscribing. It removes them from your audience and stops them counting towards your plan, but it doesn’t record an opt-out, so re-importing the same file later brings them back. To never mail these people again regardless of what gets imported, suppress the addresses instead.