Create a sunset policy

What will this help with?

• Improved email engagement and sender reputation

• Decrease spam complaints by targeting interested contacts

What is a sunset policy

It is an email list management policy that sets up rules to identify long-term inactive/non-engaged users and remove them from your email list forever to ensure that no future emails are sent to them. This usually improves your email engagement and thus sender reputation.

How to create a sunset policy?

We already created the active and inactive segments. Sunset policy is usually applied on the inactive segment. For this you need to set up some criteria to senset inactive contacts. You can define the sunset policy criteria by answering below questions:

1. What activity (opens, clicks, submissions, etc.) do you want to track to sunset your inactive contacts?

2. For how many days will you send emails to an inactive contacts before sunsetting them?

Here’s a sample course of action you can take for users not opening your emails for the following number of days:

Inactive period	What to do
30 days	Reduce the frequency of monthly emails.
60 days	Send engagement/win-back campaigns.
90 days	Send them a survey email asking about their interest in your emails.
120 days.	Sunset them by adding them to the suppression list or removing them from your ESP's list.

Note: This is just a sample, and the days/actions might differ for your industry and business. Therefore, take all of these things into consideration before creating your sunset policy.

BONUS:
Customize this sheet to create a sunset policy for your brand and share it with your team.