A common misconception among email marketers is the belief that overall volume of messages is the most critical aspect of an email campaign's sending strategy. This mindset often drives senders to pursue rapid results, neglecting essential steps that not only enhance deliverability, but also protect the reputation of their accounts and domains.

The way of thinking that "the more emails I send - the more people are likely to see it! is only true, when each and every one of your contacts is going to actively engage with received email. But, the fact is, not all recipients will engage with received messages. Additionally, it is important to consider situations where customers may not be interested in your product/newsletter/offer. They may delete your email, mark it as spam, or simply ignore it without opening. This approach is likely to harm your deliverability in the long run.  
How can you properly prepare your contact list and select contacts wisely to minimize the risk of mass bounces? We address these questions in the following article.

Each provider strives to deliver messages to its users as quickly as possible. However, it's important to note, that monitoring systems continuously analyze both - the content of messages and recipients' behavior. For bulk senders, these systems are especially sensitive to any irregularities. If recipients frequently mark emails as "spam", anti-spam systems will quickly detect this pattern, causing similar emails to be automatically flagged as spam. In some cases, the server may take further action, such as delaying or blocking the reception of these messages (throttling, greylisting).

Paradoxically, increasing the volume of mailings or repeating the campaign without any changes won't solve the problem at all. The key to success lies in building a highly engaged contact list, that ensures a high level of recipient activity. Although filtering out valuable contacts may sometimes mean losing seemingly desirable ones, prioritizing quality and stability will yield measurable benefits for both: short- and long-term mailing strategies.

Let's analyze a simple example: if you send a campaign to 100,000 recipients but only 10% open the email, it means 90% did not. Repeating this approach multiple times will result in 90% of your emails being unwanted or outright ignored after just a few campaigns. Consequently, your emails are far more likely to end up in spam folders - and this is the last thing every sender expects. 

The solution? Reverse the approach. Focus on the 10% of recipients who engage with your emails. By targeting only this engaged segment, your campaign’s open rate will significantly increase. Although the overall volume will be lower - the engagement will be much higher. This simple trick enhances your email address's reputation with ISPs, leading to more emails being delivered to inboxes. As your reputation strengthens, you can gradually re-engage contacts who previously stopped opening your emails. This strategy will result in a smaller, highly engaged list, better email delivery, higher open rates, and improved results at a lower cost.

Each contact has a status on your list. Engaged status means that the contact has opened at least one email in the last 6 months. Active status means that the contact appears to be real, and can receive mail - but has not opened an email in the last 6 months. The first step is to make sure you have a segment of each.  You may already have some default segments in your account that contain just engaged or just active contacts. If you don't, we highly recommend creating two new segments. 

For your next campaign, send only to the Engaged Contacts segment - but remember that all other rules still apply:

Next, you’ll want to break your Active Contacts into smaller lists. Select the segment with only Active contacts, click "Create", and choose the Nth Selection Tool. This tool will evenly distribute contacts into a specified number of lists. The more Active contacts you have, the more lists you’ll want to create. For example, if you have 100,000 total contacts and 90,000 of them are Active, it may be beneficial to create 9 lists, distributing 10,000 contacts into each list. For more details, check out this article: How to Use the Nth Selection Tool.

You’ve likely improved your external reputation by sending only to Engaged contacts, and now is a good time to try to re-engage some of your older contacts who haven’t opened your emails in a while. In your next send, try to include one of the smaller lists of Active contacts. Any of these contacts who open an email will automatically be added to your Engaged Contacts segment, successfully re-engaging them. Over the course of your next several mailings, rotate through each of the smaller lists, but remember to include only one or two small lists at a time. You can send to each of these smaller lists up to three or four times.

Now that you've gone through all of your Active Contacts, it's time to remove some of them from your list. At this point, if a recipient has not opened any of your emails and been added to your Engaged Segment, it is highly unlikely that they ever will. Your Engaged segment holds the most value, and retaining inactive contacts can negatively impact your reputation. While it may feel difficult to let go of these contacts, they should now be considered inactive. Fortunately, there is an easy way to automate this process through Contact Pruning. For more details, refer to this article: How does the Contact Pruning Works.

You’ll need to decide how many emails are worth sending before letting go of inactive contacts. This number may vary based on the content you’re sending and the subscription preferences of the contact. Remember, you always have the option to reactivate these contacts later if you want to try re-engaging them.

If you feel you might be tempted to keep them, consider deleting these contacts from your account entirely.
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PRO TIP: By gathering new contacts through a double opt-in web form, you ensure you're building a list of Engaged recipients right from the start!