Hello @PhyllisW33 ,
The lowest three tiers of contacts are 0-500, 501-1000, and 1001-2500. As far as reducing your contact numbers, there's a few things I can recommend to make sure you're trimming away less valuable contacts with more precision.
The first and easiest is to simply get rid of any bounced contacts our system recommends for removal. This can be done via an email's specific bounce report. For more info on managing your bounces, as well as step-by-step instructions and visual guidance for removal, I'd recommend following along with this article.
The second method would be using segmentation to get rid of chronic non-openers and/or low engagement contacts. You can use segmentation to filter out contacts who've chronically not opened your emails. You can then further manage this segment by adding it to a list, determining which contacts may still be worth keeping (such as very recent additions based on Date Added), and then deleting all the remaining non-openers and the segment list. There's also our pre-built low engagement segmentation, which you can use to re-engage those specific contacts that rarely if ever open your emails.
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If you're on the older Email plan, you could call our Billing team to see if you can switch over to the newer Lite plan. However before doing so, I'd recommend checking out what's available on your current Email plan on your account's internal Plans & Pricing page (link only works if you're logged into your account) versus what's available in the Lite plan.
Email sits between Lite and Standard in terms of functionalities, but is also priced as such. This means if you're regularly using a tool/functionality that would only be available on the Standard plan, then it would be more cost effective to remain on the older Email/Email Plus pricing structure, rather than switching to the Lite/Standard/Premium structure. However, if you're only using functionalities in your Email plan that are fully available in a Lite plan, then it would be more cost effective to switch to the more modern pricing structure.
The main questions to keep in mind when it comes to swapping from Email to Lite would be:
Do you need to schedule emails ahead of time, or do you typically just send them right away when you're done with them? Lite only allows for immediate sending, no scheduling.
Do you need more detailed drilldowns of email reports? Lite only allows for basic numbers and stats for email reporting, it does not include more detailed drilldowns of open times per contact, who clicked what specific links at specific times, etc.
How advanced of automation are you using? Lite has access to birthday automation, whereas Email has access to a few more automations types, like Anniversary.
Will you be needing additional users on your account in the future? Email plans can have a few additional users beyond the owner, but Lite only allows for a single login.
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For the final suggestions, this would depend on how much account access and latent functionalities you're wanting during those months of less frequent usage.
The first option would be to suspend your account for those months of downtime. This will reduce your monthly cost for keeping the account open, while still allowing access and some basic functions to continue. For example, accounts with 2500 or less contacts (across all applicable tiers) would only pay $5 per month to keep their account in suspension. Since suspension still has a subscription charge, it would draw from existing credits within your account (such as from prepayment), before charging your payment info. For a full rundown of how suspension works, I'd definitely recommend checking out our article on the topic.
The second option would be to wholly cancel your account. This would cut off access to your account, and stop certain functionalities like sign up forms from functioning at all. However, there would be no charge at all until you choose to reactivate the account. That said, cancelling an account while you have existing credits on your account, even those from prepayment, would result in them being surrendered. Since you're on a prepayment currently, I wouldn't recommend cancelling until you've at least exhausted your prepayment credits. For a full rundown of how cancellation works, I'd definitely recommend checking out our article on the topic.
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For more info on all these topics and more related to account billing, I'd recommend checking out our Community's Billing FAQ.
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