How to Remove Inactive Email Subscribers in EmailOctopus

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If hundreds or thousands of subscribers haven’t opened one of your emails in months, continuing to send campaigns to those contacts can make your engagement numbers look worse and may mean you’re paying for subscribers who aren’t actually reading your emails.

That’s why periodically cleaning inactive subscribers from your email list can be an important part of email marketing maintenance.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to identify and remove inactive subscribers in EmailOctopus using a 90-day inactivity window.

There’s also an important second condition we’ll add to the segment so we don’t accidentally remove new subscribers who simply haven’t been on the list long enough to have 90 days of email activity.

Why Clean Inactive Subscribers From Your Email List?

Over time, almost every email list accumulates subscribers who stop engaging.

Some people may have changed email addresses. Others may no longer be interested in the content. Some may have signed up years ago and simply stopped opening your campaigns.

Whatever the reason, continuing to send campaigns to a large number of inactive subscribers can distort your email marketing metrics.

Cleaning your list can help you:

• Reduce the number of inactive contacts on your list.
• Get a more accurate picture of subscriber engagement.
• Improve your reported email open rates.
• Focus your campaigns on people who are actually engaging.
• Potentially reduce your email marketing costs.

For EmailOctopus specifically, contacts marked as unsubscribed do not count toward your subscribed contact total.

If your plan or pricing is based on your number of active subscribers, removing inactive contacts from that count can potentially save money as well.

How Long Should a Subscriber Be Inactive Before You Remove Them?

There isn’t one inactivity period that works for every email list.

For this example, we’re going to use 90 days without opening a campaign.

If you’re sending emails regularly, 90 days can provide a useful window for identifying subscribers who haven’t engaged with multiple campaigns.

If you send emails less frequently, you may want to use a longer period.

The important thing is choosing an inactivity window that makes sense for your actual sending schedule.

Step 1: Open Your EmailOctopus List

Log into EmailOctopus and open the email list you want to clean.

Before removing anyone, we’re going to create a segment that identifies subscribers who meet our definition of inactive.

This allows us to preview the contacts before making any changes to their subscription status.

Step 2: Create a Segment for Subscribers Who Haven’t Opened in 90 Days

Create a new segment inside your EmailOctopus list.

For the first condition, select campaign activity and configure the segment to find subscribers who:

Did not open a campaign within the last 90 days.

This gives us the foundation of our inactive subscriber segment.

However, we aren’t finished yet.

Step 3: Exclude New Subscribers From the Inactive Segment

This is the most important part of the process.

If you simply create a segment containing everyone who hasn’t opened an email during the last 90 days, you can accidentally include people who recently joined your list.

Imagine someone subscribed yesterday.

They obviously haven’t opened one of your emails during the previous 90 days because they weren’t on your list 90 days ago.

That doesn’t make them an inactive subscriber.

It makes them a new subscriber.

Add a Second Condition Based on When the Subscriber Joined

To prevent new subscribers from being included, add another condition to the segment.

Configure it so the subscriber’s added date:

Is not within the last 90 days.

Now the segment is looking for people who meet both conditions:

1. They have not opened a campaign within the last 90 days.
2. They were not added to the list within the last 90 days.

This gives us a much more useful definition of an inactive subscriber.

We’re looking for people who have actually had at least 90 days to engage with our emails and still haven’t opened a campaign.

Why the Second Condition Matters

Without the subscriber age condition, your cleanup can become too aggressive.

Consider three subscribers:

• Subscriber A joined two years ago and hasn’t opened anything in the last 90 days.
• Subscriber B joined six months ago and hasn’t opened anything in the last 90 days.
• Subscriber C joined yesterday and hasn’t opened anything in the last 90 days.

The first two subscribers may reasonably qualify as inactive under our 90-day rule.

The third one doesn’t.

By requiring the subscriber to have been on the list for longer than the inactivity window, we avoid penalizing new subscribers who haven’t had enough opportunities to engage yet.

Step 4: Preview Your Inactive Email Subscribers

Once both conditions are configured, preview the segment.

EmailOctopus will show you how many subscribers match the criteria.

Take a moment to review the results before changing anyone’s subscription status.

In the example used for this tutorial, the original list contained 5,259 subscribed contacts.

The 90-day inactivity segment identified 433 subscribers who had been on the list for at least 90 days but had not opened a campaign during that period.

That’s a meaningful portion of the list that was no longer engaging with the weekly email campaigns.

Step 5: Select the Inactive Subscribers

Once you’re comfortable with the segment criteria, select the contacts contained within the segment.

Make sure you’re working specifically with the segment you created rather than the entire email list.

Before applying a bulk action, it’s worth checking the segment conditions one more time:

• Campaign activity: did not open within the last 90 days.
• Added date: is not within the last 90 days.

If both conditions are correct, you can proceed with the cleanup.

Step 6: Mark the Inactive Contacts as Unsubscribed

With the inactive contacts selected, use EmailOctopus’s bulk actions to mark those contacts as unsubscribed.

This removes them from your active subscribed audience without requiring you to manually process each contact individually.

In the example from this tutorial, removing the 433 inactive subscribers reduced the active list from:

5,259 subscribers to 4,826 subscribers.

The list became smaller, but the remaining subscriber count was a better representation of the people who actually had an opportunity to engage with the emails.

Why a Smaller Email List Can Be Better

Watching your subscriber count decrease may initially feel like a bad thing.

But the goal of email marketing isn’t simply to collect the largest number of email addresses possible.

The goal is to build an audience that actually wants to receive and engage with your emails.

Your Engagement Metrics Become More Meaningful

Imagine sending an email to 5,000 subscribers and getting 1,000 opens.

That’s a 20% open rate.

But what if 1,000 people on the list haven’t opened any of your emails in years?

If those inactive contacts are removed and the same 1,000 engaged people open your next campaign, your reported engagement rate changes substantially.

You haven’t magically created more engaged readers. You’ve simply stopped including a large group of inactive contacts in the calculation.

You May Be Paying for Subscribers Who Never Read Your Emails

Email marketing platforms frequently structure pricing around the number of subscribers or contacts in your account.

For EmailOctopus, marking inactive contacts as unsubscribed means those contacts no longer count toward your subscribed contact total.

If an inactive list is pushing you into a higher subscriber tier, cleaning the list may help reduce your email marketing costs.

Should You Always Use 90 Days?

No.

The 90-day window used in this tutorial works because the list receives emails regularly.

Your ideal inactivity period should depend on how frequently you communicate with subscribers.

If you send several emails every week, 90 days represents many opportunities for someone to engage.

If you only send a newsletter once every month or two, 90 days may not provide enough data to confidently decide that someone is inactive.

You could instead use:

• 90 days.
• Six months.
• Nine months.
• One year.

The exact number matters less than making sure subscribers have had a reasonable number of opportunities to receive and engage with your campaigns.

Be Careful With Email Open Data

Email opens are useful for identifying broad engagement patterns, but they shouldn’t necessarily be treated as a perfect measurement of whether an individual person read an email.

Email clients and privacy features can affect how open activity is recorded.

For that reason, you may want to use a longer inactivity window or consider other engagement signals before cleaning a particularly important list.

The more conservative your cleanup criteria are, the less likely you are to remove someone who still wants your emails.

Consider a Re-Engagement Campaign Before Removing Subscribers

Another option is to contact inactive subscribers one final time before removing them from your active audience.

You could create a campaign specifically for the inactive segment with a simple message asking if they still want to hear from you.

Subscribers who engage can remain on the list.

Those who continue to show no activity can then be moved to unsubscribed status.

This extra step isn’t required for the process demonstrated here, but it can make sense for businesses that want to be more conservative about removing older contacts.

How Often Should You Clean Your Email List?

Email list cleanup doesn’t necessarily need to happen every week.

For many businesses, periodically reviewing inactive subscribers is enough.

The right frequency depends on:

• How quickly your list grows.
• How frequently you send campaigns.
• How many inactive subscribers accumulate.
• Your email marketing platform’s subscriber limits.
• The cost of your current email marketing plan.

If you send email campaigns consistently, checking your inactive audience every few months can help prevent years of disengaged subscribers from accumulating.

Final Thoughts: Keep Your Email List Focused on Engaged Subscribers

A healthy email list isn’t necessarily the biggest list.

It’s a list of people who have actually demonstrated some level of interest in receiving your emails.

Using EmailOctopus segments makes it relatively simple to identify contacts who haven’t engaged for a specific period and remove them from your active subscriber count.

The key is making sure your segment doesn’t accidentally include people who recently subscribed.

For the 90-day cleanup demonstrated here, the process is:

1. Open your EmailOctopus list.
2. Create a new segment.
3. Set campaign activity to subscribers who did not open within the last 90 days.
4. Add a second condition excluding subscribers added within the last 90 days.
5. Preview the resulting segment.
6. Review the contacts before making changes.
7. Select the inactive subscribers.
8. Mark those contacts as unsubscribed.

That second condition is what makes the process work properly.

Instead of removing everyone who hasn’t opened an email recently, you’re identifying subscribers who have been on your list long enough to engage but still haven’t opened your campaigns.

The result is a smaller, cleaner email list that gives you a more useful picture of the audience you’re actually reaching.