The Art Of Deliverability
Edition #3 – The Email Growth Cycle: Growing, Nurturing, and Pruning

Imagine your overall email marketing process as a large garden—how would you envision it? Is it tidy and vibrant, filled with blossoming flowers? Or is it unkempt and withered, overgrown with old plants, and in need of some TLC? Just like a garden needs year-round maintenance, so do your email marketing efforts. Full landscaping isn’t always necessary. Regular pruning can breathe new life into your campaigns, making space for “new buds” on your list and ultimately helping you reach your desired audience. 

A common misconception in email marketing is that more subscribers always equals more revenue. However, this isn’t necessarily true. In today’s digital age, it’s crucial to stay attuned to your subscribers’ needs, keep your finger on the pulse, and recognize that no response is sometimes still a response.

If a portion of your subscribers have stopped opening your emails, and haven’t done so for 12 months or more of regular emailing, it’s a strong indicator that they no longer wish to receive them. On the other hand, if you haven’t emailed them in over a year, your subscribers may have forgotten they ever signed up and wouldn’t expect to hear from you at all. Emailing those subscribers can damage your Sender Reputation, which can lead to negative results such as poor open rates, elevated bounces, and worst case, spam complaints. So, what can you do about this?

Encourage New Growth 

It’s a good idea to give new subscribers an introduction to their new subscription, and the automation workflow builder provides a great opportunity to onboard folks to the content you deliver.

This approach is helpful for a few reasons:

• Their relationship with you starts off in a curated, engaging manner.
• You can set further expectations around things like content topics, email frequency, and whatever else you feel will cultivate informed and engaged subscribers.
• Finally, an onboarding journey can help you identify folks whose interest was perhaps a bit transient and who may not be genuinely interested in opening the messages you send them.

For example, if you have a 3-email onboarding journey, you can identify folks who opened the first email but ignored the latter two. This can be done easily via subscriber segments.

To create such a segment, use criteria like this:

This segment would gather up subscribers who either didn’t open the first email (people who don’t open their onboarding email may be safely considered uninterested), along with anyone who did open the first email, but ignored the latter 2. 

This is especially useful in situations where newsletter subscriptions are bundled with other actions, like making a purchase from your organization or creating an account to use a free service.

Better yet, you can use this identification of less attentive subscribers as an opportunity to send a re-engagement email and confirm whether or not they’d like to receive your emails (this can be built directly into your journey, using the appropriate workflow). Perhaps they would respond to a special offer, or even a simple email to say, “Hey, it looks like you haven’t opened what we’ve sent so far since you’ve begun your subscription with us. Click the link below to let us know if you’d like to stay subscribed to our newsletter.” 

You’ll find that people appreciate these courtesies and may respond by reaffirming their engagement, which helps you maintain a healthier subscriber base.

As we mentioned earlier, it’s often the belief that more subscribers are better, but if they are dormant or unengaged (especially from the beginning), it’s best to let those people go and focus on those who are most active with your campaigns. Working this into an onboarding journey is a great way to get your list off to a great start, in exchange for letting the window shoppers fall off early before they begin to drag down your metrics, complain of spam, etc.

Nurse Your Garden Back to Health! 

Sticking to the gardening theme, not every neglected plant should be indiscriminately pulled from its roots. Some may have been snowed under during the winter and need a little light and water. Your subscribers are the same. They may have been bombarded by emails and missed the last few you sent, or simply taken a break from email. A good starting point here is a re-engagement campaign designed to refresh their interest in your emails. We’d recommend doing the following for those who last opened an email 6-12 months ago.

To re-confirm your subscribers’ permission, you could send a one-off campaign with two simple call-to-action buttons. One for "Yes" and one for "No." The "Yes" button should redirect to a confirmation page or a landing page on your website, while the "No" button should take them to an unsubscribe confirmation page (simply add the tag [% unsub_url %] to the link). 

Keep in mind that a re-engagement campaign to your less active subscribers may be better spread across a couple of sends, rather than one large one, depending on how many people on your list you’re targeting. A large volume of sends to unengaged subscribers all in one go could harm your sender reputation, so if they account for a sizable portion of your audience, you’d likely be better off sending in a few smaller batches.

Here are some examples of re-engagement campaigns. After a set period, say 7 days, segment those people who didn’t click or open, and simply copy and paste those contacts into our deletion tool to remove them from your list. You can read more on this in our support article “How to create a subscriber re-engagement campaign”. 

Additionally, to retain your subscribers’ interest, you need to ensure you’re emailing them with relevant content, which they signed up for, and ensure you’re sending them enough emails to remain engaged, but not so many that they become overwhelmed with email fatigue. The world of email marketing can be tricky, but if you can get the balance right, it’s more than worth the effort. Keep reading below for more industry information on how to perfect your practices!

Clean Up Old Leaves and Make Fresh Ground! 🍂

If it’s been a year or more since you last reached out to your subscribers, or if some recipients have stopped engaging with your emails, they’re likely too outdated to re-engage, and you’d be better off weeding them out entirely. To help out even further, you could proactively change their status to Opt-out. Don’t worry - your contact can re-subscribe to the list again if they wish! 

Many novice email marketers will repeatedly email old lists and inactive subscribers in hopes of converting them into sales or returning them to an active state. Sadly, this method seldom works, if ever. 

Conversely, it can: 

• Annoy recipients who haven’t engaged with your emails in a long time.
• Increase the risk of folks marking your emails as spam. 
• Lead to higher bounce rates from old, unengaged, or abandoned addresses that no longer accept mail. 
• Harm your Sender Reputation, reducing deliverability to engaged subscribers. 

These are worst-case consequences for senders reaching out to old lists and can seriously impact your ability to reach future subscribers. Not only can sending to those unsuspecting recipients annoy them and harm your brand, but you could also be inadvertently violating anti-spam laws and policies. This can lead to direct spam complaints as well as blocklistings and suspensions if the issue is significant. The older a list is, the more likely that the list can contain spam traps, which cause block listings. It pays to keep your email practices squeaky clean! Our Compliance team is always on hand to answer any questions about best practices, spam complaints, and re-engagement campaigns.

Roundup and Compliance Top Tips! 

Feeling ready for a cleanup in 2025? Here’s a little recap along with our best practice tips for you and your teams to incorporate into your email routine!

Send to your own permission-based and opted-in subscribers. Never purchase or rent email lists.
Everyone knows how annoying it is to receive unsolicited communications, be that a marketing text message, an email from a brand you’ve not heard from since 2013, or someone knocking on your door mid-dinner to sell you a new roof. If you commit to respecting privacy by avoiding having your sends fall into any sort of unwelcome category, you’ll build stronger, more loyal relationships with your subscribers and customers. At the same time, you’ll avoid making bad impressions on those who have yet to join your audience. Not only is spam annoying, it can be costly.

It doesn’t have to be goodbye!
Re-engage your inactive subscribers with targeted campaigns before removing them.

Use Emma's segments feature to gather subscribers who have not opened a mailing in the last year, send them a friendly email to gauge whether or not they’re interested in remaining in your audience, and archive those who don’t open that mailing.

Are you sure your subscribers want to receive your email?
Use confirmed opt-in to guarantee your subscribers’ permission and interest. A confirmed opt-in process ensures that subscribers enter the correct email address, leading to a cleaner list and helping reduce your bounce rate. This is super simple. See how to switch between single and confirmed opt-in here.

Make it easy for subscribers to update their preferences using Emma’s Preference Center.
If you send campaigns with regular frequency, like daily, weekly, monthly, etc., you can allow your subscribers to select how often they receive your emails with a contact field in the preference center. Then, you can create segments based on their preferences and target each group accordingly.

This is just one of many ways to use contact fields, segments, and subscriber preferences to make sends feel tailored to each individual. You can also experiment with contact fields based on interests or other relevant categories. Get creative!

Authenticate your domain to improve deliverability.
If you’ve not checked on your authentication settings in a while, this is a great time to make sure your mailings look legitimate when they arrive in your subscribers’ inboxes. It’s not often, but sender requirements can change over time, and you could be operating with a missing or outdated SPF, DKIM, or DMARC configuration that’s limiting your deliverability. 

If you’ve never set up authentication for your sending domain, you may have been leaving some engagement on the table, so to speak, and unintentionally limiting your reach to your subscribers. Make sure this is in tip-top shape so that your mailings look professional and trustworthy while avoiding pitfalls like the spam folder!

We hope you’ll enjoy adopting these best practices and are now feeling ready to get out there and let your campaigns blossom!