Marketing & Communications
October 29, 2025 · Last updated on November 5, 2025
Recipe: Remove Unengaged Customers from Your Emails
# emails
# marketing
# recipes for success
Makes: An autotag to identify and remove unengaged customers
Email deliverability depends on engagement. Sending to inactive addresses can hurt your sender reputation, trigger spam filters, and lower open rates.
This recipe helps you find unengaged contacts who haven’t opened or clicked your emails or made a purchase in a while. Once identified, you can exclude them from future mailings. It’s a quick way to improve list health and boost engagement with your most responsive customers.
- Access to Customer Lists in Spektrix
- Your linked Email Contact Preference (Dotdigital)
- Ability to create and manage Autotags and Global Segments
Prep: 30 minutes
Cook: 10 minutes
- Identify inactive email contacts
- Improve your email deliverability and engagement rates
- Keep your data clean and useful for reporting and segmentation
- Customer Lists: Tools for identifying audiences based on behavior or activity
- Contact Preferences: Used to link Spektrix data to Dotdigital for email permissions
- Autotags: Automatically applied labels that keep your segments up to date
- Global Segments: Reusable audience filters for consistent targeting across lists
- Create a Customer List using your email contact preference in the pre-filter.
- In the main filter, add:
- A Marketing Segment for customers who haven’t clicked a link in any email within the last 2 years (730 days)
- A Purchasing Segment for customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last 2 years (730 days)
- Update the count to see how many customers fit your criteria
- In the Output, include these metrics:
- Email Address
- Date Created
- Never Booked
- Booked Once
- Weeks Since Last Order
- Weeks Since Last Visit
- Weeks Till Next Visit
- Export the list and analyze it to confirm your criteria accurately identify unengaged customers. Refine if needed
- Create a new Autotag using your refined criteria
- The tag will update automatically. If a customer makes a new purchase or re-engages, they will be removed
- Create a Global Segment using this Autotag
- When building future customer lists, add the Global Segment and check “Not” to exclude unengaged customers
Try This Twist
Before removing inactive contacts permanently, set up a Mailing List Re-engagement Program in Dotdigital. Send a targeted message inviting them to stay subscribed, update preferences, or rebook. Use your synced tag group to track responses.
In this article, we’ll give an overview of how to link one or more Contact Preferences to Dotdigital. We’ll also cover how unsubscribes are managed and how your Customers can manage their own Contact Preferences online.
The Improving Retention Program Template lets you automate a number of emails aimed at getting first time visitors to return.
Comments (0)
Popular
Table Of Contents
Dive in