Getting into the primary inbox of your recipients is influenced by past sending engagement. Positive engagement signals like opens, clicks, forwards, and replies from recipients demonstrate to inbox providers that people are interested in your messaging.  Negative engagement signals like lack of opens and clicks, unsubscribes, and spam reports demonstrate that your email marketing efforts are not aligned with your recipient’s needs.

What is an email sunset policy and why is it important?

"Sunsetting" refers to no longer sending emails to unengaged contacts. This can boost email deliverability by ensuring that you’re only sending emails to contacts who want to see them.

When lots of your emails are received by a contact and ignored, their email provider's (e.g. Gmail or Hotmail) automated filters may start to learn that your email isn't important to that person and can be sent to lower priority folders, or spam. If this occurs on a wide scale, the email providers themselves may begin to automatically filter all of your emails to the spam folder.

The sunset policy feature makes it easy to automatically sunset unengaged contacts. It is enabled by default, and we highly recommend you keep it enabled; it is a best practice to have an email sunsetting strategy in place.

A contact is considered to have "engaged" with an email if they open, click or reply.

When is a contact eligible to be sunset?

A contact will be categorized as unengaged if they meet one of the following criteria:

Never opened a marketing email from you and hasn't opened more than 6 emails you've sent them. 

If a contact engages with an email this "resets the clock" on the time period. The "clock" starts over from the next time they are sent an email after the engagement occurred.

Where Can I Find the Contacts Which Have Been Sunset?

There is now a default segment in the Contacts dashboard labeled "Unengaged contacts". Every contact that has been sunset will be listed here.

Note: You can also see this option in Broadcast emails and choose not to send to unengaged contacts directly from there.


Need Help?

If you have any further questions, please start a Live Chat. Just "Click" on the Chat Icon in the lower right corner to talk with our support team.