Well in a business context it’s definitely not enjoying a cocktail on a beautiful destination whilst looking at the sunset, sorry to disappoint you there! Sunsetting in email marketing is letting go of email subscribers who are not engaged. 

Yeah, you read it right, to have a successful email marketing strategy it is not about the highest number of subscribers it’s about having the most engaged subscribers that actually buy from you. 

Still not convinced? Let us give you our 3 main reasons why sunsetting is not a nice-to-have but an actual must-have to every email marketing strategy. 

1. 1. Bye-bye spam folder

      You might know that all mailbox providers are actually tracking how your customers interact with your emails. This means that your sender’s reputation gets boosted as your emails receive a lot of interaction. You might hear us coming: frequently sending emails to people who are not actually interested will kill your engagement rate and thus indirectly also your sender reputation. As your sender reputation decreases your mails might be sent to the spam folder straight away. Which leaves you in the vicious cycle of even fewer people engaging with your emails and an even worse sender reputation. 

   2. Get a good view of your actual campaign performance

      If a large part of your subscriber base is already unengaged it might be difficult for you to figure out what the other half of engaged users is actually digging. Your engagement data will be polluted, which will make it very hard to make decisions on how to improve your email strategy even further. So time to clear out the clutter and let the data speak for itself.

   3. Increase your ROI

      Most email service providers like MailChimp, HubSpot, .. will charge you a monthly fee based on the overall number of subscribers you have. So do you really want to continue paying for subscribers who have not opened or interacted with all the awesome content you’ve created over the past year? No, really the choice is yours ;-) 

Now we hear you coming: How exactly do we need to start cleaning our database? 

Well, that’s what we’re here for. Get in touch with our Dotters and get going with your sunsetting strategy!