What to do with inactive leads

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

We are currently working on a plan to send out an opt-in email to our inactive leads (those that have not engaged by opening/clicking an email in the past 6 months, and any soft bounces that occurred in the past 3 months).  We are mainly doing this because we were told this will help us get off of the blacklist.

My thoughts were to create a trigger to change the leads that do not open the email to "marketing suspended" and add them to a specific list.  We also were thinking of possibly setting up a campaign where sales reaches out to these leads to determine what to do with them in our database.

Is this the best way to handle our inactive leads?  Open to more suggestions and to hear about every else's process.  Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13]

There are several options and threads on this topic.

• Opt In is always better and reduces blacklisting events.
• but you can't email the people who DO NOT opt in again.
• And emailing people who aren't engaged may cause you to get blacklisted again.
• Don't bother with Hard Bounced at all.
• Soft bounces shouldn't be separated; they are temp failures and it just won't matter.
• Anyone who does not opt in should be set to Invalid. I use a set of batch campaigns to find all hard bounces and highly inactive leads to invalidate on a regular basis.

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

Thanks, Josh.  Always appreciate your help.

Maybe opt-in isn't the right word for this because these leads already consented to receiving emails a long time ago.  They have just been inactive by not opening/clicking on an email in the past 6 months.  The "opt-in" email is asking them to update their email preferences.  Assuming this may change your answer?  We may end up not contacting all of them, and creating some Smart Lists with groups of leads that we want to target to receive this email instead.  We sadly have over 80k inactive leads, and our database only has 152k marketable leads.  Our plan is to split up the sends so we don't blast it to all at once and risk being blacklisted again.  Not having a real CRM is what's harming our database as well.