Archive Inactive Contacts

If you have a lot of inactive subscribed contacts who no longer interact with your email campaigns, you may want to archive them. Archiving removes contacts from your marketing audience without losing any of their data, which can help you lower your costs and focus on your biggest fans.

In this article, you'll learn how to archive inactive contacts.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• When you archive a contact, you remove the contact from your marketing audience but don't lose any data. Archived contacts won't count toward your bill and can be unarchived at any time. To learn more, check out Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts.
• You may be able to win back the interest of inactive contacts and earn revenue from them, so it pays to try a re-engagement campaign before you archive them.

Segment and archive by campaign activity

To segment and archive contacts based on their campaign activity, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click Audience dashboard.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. Click View Contacts.
5. Click New Segment.
   
6. Choose all from the Contacts match drop-down menu.
7. For the first condition, set the drop-down menus to Campaign Activity | did not open. In the third drop-down menu, choose from the list of Aggregate Campaigns.
   
8. Click Add to create a new condition, and set the drop-down menus to Campaign Activity | was sent. In the third drop-down menu, choose from the list of Aggregate Campaigns. This lets you target subscribers who have been sent the campaigns, but haven't opened them.
9. Click Preview Segment.
10. Check the box next to each contact you want to archive.
11. Click the Actions drop-down menu and choose Archive.
    
12. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, click Confirm.
    

We’ll display a success message that tells you how many contacts you archived. To view your archived contacts, click the Manage contacts drop-down and choose View archived contacts.

What about new subscribers?

If you're worried you might archive new subscribed contacts, add a condition to the segment above. Set this second condition to Date Added | is before | a specific date. Choose a date that was before your last campaign or a couple of campaigns ago to protect any new contacts who haven't received a campaign yet.

Segment and archive by contact rating

Contact ratings are a measure of overall engagement with your emails. We recalculate them each time you send a campaign.

To segment and archive contacts with a low contact rating, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
   
2. Click Audience dashboard.
   
3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. Click View Contacts.
5. Click New Segment.
   
6. Choose any from the Contacts match drop-down menu.
7. For the first condition, set the drop-down menus to Contact Rating | is less than | 2 stars to segment for contacts with a rating of one star. This is considered a negative rating.
8. Click Preview Segment.
9. Check the box next to each contact you want to archive.
10. Click the Actions drop-down menu and choose Archive.
    
11. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, click Confirm.
    

We’ll display a success message that tells you how many contacts you archived. To view your archived contacts, click the Manage contacts drop-down and choose View archived contacts.