Businesses, companies and organizations are well aware of the fact that not every single customer they contact for the purpose of marketing their products, by means of email campaigns or any other communication channel, will ultimately express interest in the services and commodities being offered. Organizations realize the fact that the contacted customers may or may not respond to the dispatched marketing campaigns. 

Onus is on the organization to identify the profiles of all those customers within its database, who do not respond to the deployed campaigns. The organization has to subsequently either suppress these unengaged profiles by means of unsubscribing them or delete them permanently. The process of clearing up all the unengaged profiles is critical for maintaining good deliverability of the campaigns. This is essentially because nowadays most email service providers (ESPs) track how recipients interact with the forwarded campaigns i.e. how many campaigns were opened at the customer end, how many campaigns were marked as spam by the receivers etc. 

ESPs in turn utilize this information to gauge how frequently the email campaigns dispatched by an organization get categorized as spam by the recipients and this consequently tarnishes the organization's sender reputation. In other words, keeping unengaged profiles in the contact list can potentially thwart an organization from reaching out to those customers who are genuinely interested in receiving email campaigns containing product related offers, promotions and updates. 

This is the primary reason why organizations intend to delete certain customer profiles from their database. NotifyVisitors not only offers the functionality to individually delete specific profiles but also enables its users to collectively delete all the unengaged customer profiles by including them within a separate segment.

Before you begin

Kindly bear in mind the following important information before you continue reading the article:

1. NotifyVisitors offers the functionality to create segments in all of its plans.
2. In case you have recently created an account with NotifyVisitors, then there will be no prior data pertaining to the customers’ campaign activity recorded within the NotifyVisitors database, thus segmentation would not work.
3. In case you are migrating from a different notification management software, we recommend that you create a segment of inactive contacts using that software and import it to your NotifyVisitors account.

Purpose of distilling the contact list

Filtering out unengaged customers from the contact list is crucial for sustaining good deliverability. The reasons for distilling the contact list to include only those customers who are interested in your products and services are as follows:

Safeguarding sender reputation and improving deliverability scores with ESPs

As previously stated, email service providers (ESPs) track how the recipients interact with your deployed email campaigns and in turn use this information to ascertain how frequently your campaigns get marked as spam at the customer end. Fewer opened emails combined with greater number of campaigns marked as spam eventually undermine your sender reputation. 

In order to safeguard your sender reputation and improve your deliverability scores with ESPs, it is imperative that you filter out all the unengaged customers from your contact list. Moreover, having numerous inactive customers on your contact list, impedes your endeavours to reach out to those customers who are actually interested in receiving your emails.

Minimizing unsubscribe rate and enhancing open and click rate

Unresponsive recipients are most likely disinterested customers who would eventually sooner or later unsubscribe to your email campaigns. Filtering out these unengaged customers beforehand from the contact list ultimately lowers the unsubscribe rate since the distilled contact list would contain only those customers who are responsive towards your campaigns and interested in your products and services. Likewise, this would also enhance your campaigns’ open and click rates.

Preparing bespoke content for active customers

Once you distil your contact list to contain only active and responsive recipients who are actually interested in your organization’s products and services, you will also create an opportunity to personalize the content of your emails particularly around these potential customers and thereby deploy targeted campaigns specifically designed to address their interests, needs and preferences.

Retaining and engaging passive customers

Once you begin to actively track unresponsive recipients, as a result you also learn exactly when these customers begin to disengage with your brand. This vital piece of information can be harnessed by your organization to send targeted campaigns to these passive customers in order to re-engage them.

Delete users from the user list

NotifyVisitors offers the functionality to selectively delete specific profiles from your contact list. You can utilize this functionality either to delete a single profile at a time or to delete multiple profiles collectively and thereby clear your contact list of all the identified unengaged user profiles.

How to delete a single user

The step by step process to delete a single user profile is as follows:

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Segments > User List.
2. In the ‘Users Details’ section, filter users or customers according to the required criteria (Date, User ID, NV UID, Email, Phone, Name, Active Users and New Users).

3. Select any one user from the list by clicking on the user’s name mentioned under the ‘Name’ column.
4. Upon doing so, a new frame would appear on-screen containing the details of the selected user. Within this frame you would notice a button titled ‘Delete User’ (highlighted in red color). Click on the ‘Delete User’ button and confirm the deletion. The user will get deleted successfully from your NotifyVisitors account.

How to delete multiple users

The step by step process to collectively delete multiple users is as follows:

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Segments > User List.
2. In the ‘Users Details’ section, filter users according to the required criteria (Date, User ID, NV UID, Email, Phone, Name, Active Users and New Users).

3. In order to collectively select all of the filtered users in the User List, click on the checkbox present on the left hand side of the column titled ‘Name’. On the other hand, in order to selectively mark individual users, simply click one by one on the checkbox present on the left hand side of their names, listed under the ‘Name’ column.

4. Once you have selected multiple users in the User List, you would notice that a dropdown titled ‘Action’ appears in the ‘Users Details’ section. Click on the ‘Action’ dropdown.
5. Upon doing so, three options viz. Subscribe, Unsubscribe and Delete would appear in the expanded dropdown.

6. If you wish to permanently remove the selected users from your contact list, simply click on the ‘Delete’ option from the Action dropdown. Upon doing so, a new pop-up would appear on-screen prompting you to confirm your decision to permanently delete the selected users. Click on the button titled ‘Confirm’ within this pop-up.

Once you click on the ‘Confirm’ button, yet another pop-up would appear on-screen, informing you that the deletion was successful. Click on the button titled ‘OK’ within the pop-up in order to complete the deletion process.

Delete unengaged users by including them in a separate segment

Besides providing the functionality to delete individual as well as multiple users from the User List, NotifyVisitors also enables you to collectively delete all the unengaged user profiles by including them in a distinct segment. However, prior to creating this separate segment of unengaged users, you need to determine exactly which all parameters and conditions you would employ to categorize a specific user profile as inactive, in order to filter it out from your contact list. 

For instance, if a user does not respond to an email campaign which was sent 90 days ago, then that particular user can be deemed as inactive. Moreover, NotifyVisitors allows you to combine two or more conditions via the AND connector in order to enable you to include only the least engaged users in the segment. This way, only those users who satisfy all the applicable conditions set within the NotifyVisitors panel, will ultimately be deemed as inactive and thereby get included in the segment.

For example, in case a user does not respond to an email campaign which was delivered 90 days ago and also does not open or even click on the dispatched campaign, only then that specific user will be filtered out from the contact list and get included in the segment of unengaged users. So, in simple terms, our organization offers you the flexibility to set parameters, rules and conditions to distill your contact list by segregating inactive users from the active ones.

How to collect all unengaged customers in a separate segment

The default process to accumulate all unengaged/non-responsive/inactive users in a distinct segment is as follows:

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Segments > Segment.
2. In order to create a new segment to collect all the inactive users in the contact list, simply click on the button titled ‘Create New Segment’.

3. Upon doing so, a few options for creating a new segment would appear on-screen, as shown in the screenshot below. Under the heading titled ‘Past Behaviour Segments’, there will be an option titled ‘Inaction’. Kindly click on this option.

4. Upon clicking on this option, a new pop-up would appear on-screen prompting you to provide a name for the new segment in which all the inactive user profiles will get included. Enter a suitable name such as ‘Unengaged User Profiles’ for this new segment in the Input box. Then click on the ‘Submit’ button present within the same pop-up.

5. On the next screen that appears, you can add rules and conditions based on events such as Email Sent, Email Delivered, Email Clicked, Email Opened etc. all of which would work in tandem to filter out the inactive contacts from your contact list and include them in the segment you just created.

In the example provided in the screenshot below, we have configured the rules in such a manner that only those users for whom 90 days have passed since the campaign was first delivered and who did not click on the campaign in the last 30 days as well as did not open it in the past 60 days, will ultimately be filtered from the contact list and get included in the segment of unengaged users.

As previously stated, you can tweak the rules and conditions as per your desired filtering strategy since NotifyVisitors provides you with the flexibility to do so. Remember to click on the ‘Update’ button at the bottom of the page after you are done configuring the rules and then click on the ‘Publish Segment’ button located at the topmost part of the page.

Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Segments > Segment and you would notice that a certain number of your contacts get accumulated within the segment you just created.

Collectively delete all unengaged users

The step by step process to collectively remove all inactive contacts by means of deleting the segment of unengaged users is as follows:

1. Navigate to NotifyVisitors Dashboard > Settings > Profile Maintenance.

2. Within the ‘Remove Profiles’ section there exists a dropdown. Click on that dropdown.

3. You will notice that the segment of unengaged users titled ‘Unengaged User Profiles’ will get listed in the dropdown. Select this specific segment.

4. Once you have selected the segment which holds the user profiles of all your inactive contacts, click on the ‘Delete’ button (highlighted in red color).
5. Upon doing so, a pop-up will appear on-screen prompting you to confirm your decision to proceed with the deletion. Click on the button titled ‘Confirm’ present within the pop-up.

6. Once you click on the ‘Confirm’ button, the selected segment will get deleted permanently from the NotifyVisitors database.

This is how user deletion through the NotifyVisitors panel works and this is how our organization makes it convenient for you to filter out inactive users from your contact list.