Cleaning Up Old Lists --Should I "unsubscribe" contacts or "delete" them?

[MarinG40]

We've used Constant Contact since 2017, so we have contacts on our list who have been on the list for 5+ years. I'm trying to clean up our list so I'm going through the "least engaged" contacts and deleting people who haven't opened an email recently. Should I be deleting the contacts or "unsubscribing" them? In the past year we've gone from a 24% open rate to a 43% open rate. And, while deleting old contacts we're having events so we're adding new contacts. Any advice for list cleaning?

[William_A · Accepted solution]

Hello @MarinG40 ,

If you're regularly re-importing contacts through CSV files or other external sources, then you may want to consider unsubscribing those least-engaged contacts instead of just deleting them. This way, if they do actually want to be subscribed later on and engaged with your material, then they can explicitly do so via one of your sign up forms or other available methods for resubbing.

Of course, it may be a good idea to first try to engage these least-engaged, to make sure they aren't actually interested in still receiving the emails despite their lack of activity. If they do, then you can remove them from the list you create from the least engaged segment.

Once you've given these least-engaged a chance to re-engage and manually remove them from the least-engaged list, you can export that list then re-import it as an unsubscribed file for the sake of mass-unsubscribing. If you're not seeing the option to import unsubscribes, then you may need to turn on advanced permissions for your account.