Managing Unmailable and Never Active Prospects in Account Engagement

When it comes to marketing and engaging with contacts for your organization, maintaining a clean and engaged prospect database is essential for success. Two key categories to be aware of are unmailable prospects and never-active prospects. Understanding these groups and implementing effective strategies to manage them can significantly enhance your account engagement efforts and ensure that your messaging reaches those who are genuinely interested while re-engaging those who may have been lost.

Unmailable Prospects in Account Engement

What Is an Unmailable Prospect?

An unmailable prospect is one in the system who has either globally unsubscribed from your emails, has been marked as “Do not email” by your team on the prospect record, has a hard bounce, or has five soft bounces. Luckily, these prospects do not count towards your database limits, but for data cleanliness, it is important to remove those prospects who are not mailable.

Best Practices

To avoid having many unmailable prospects in your Account Engagement organization, follow these best practices:

1. Review unmailable prospects quarterly or a few times a year and add those unmailable prospects to the recycle bin.
2. Ensure you aren’t emailing your prospects too often, as that can cause them to globally unsubscribe from emails.
3. Send meaningful and engaging emails to your prospects.
4. Ensure the correct prospects are receiving the right emails. Someone who did not sign up for newsletters, for example, might not want to receive them and could globally unsubscribe.

Recommendations

Here are some additional recommendations to reduce the number of unmailable prospects:

1. Make sure to include a link to your email preference center in your emails. Try and drive your prospects to click on the email preference center link instead of the unsubscribe link. This can help prospects get on the correct email lists and get emails about information they are interested in, which helps prevent them from globally unsubscribing from emails. 
2. If a prospect does globally unsubscribe, send an autoresponder email with a link to resubscribe, and include verbiage in the email such as, “Here is an email confirmation that you have unsubscribed from all emails. In case you accidentally unsubscribed, here is the link to start receiving our emails again.”
3. Create a list of prospects who have been unmailable for a certain timeframe (1 year, 6 months, etc.) and once or twice a year, go through and delete all of the prospects on that list.

Never Active Prospects in Account Engagement

What Is a Never Active Prospect?

A never active prospect is a prospect in the system who has not taken one of three actions to indicate they are “Active”—submitting a form, visiting a landing page, or clicking on a link in an email. These prospects were created in Account Engagement by syncing over from Salesforce, through a list import, or by manual creation.

You can find the never active prospects in your organization by going to the “Prospects” tab at the top of your org, clicking the filter dropdown, and selecting the “never active prospects” option. Another way to distinguish a never active prospect from an active prospect is by the icon color on their prospect record under the “Insight” section. If someone’s icon is green, that means they are considered an active prospect; if the icon is red, then they are considered never active.

Your Account Engagement organization limits are based on mailable prospects, so if your system has many never active prospects who are mailable, they are taking up prime real estate! To ensure your data is clean, follow some of the best practices below to either encourage these prospects to become active or remove them if they continue to be never active.

Best Practices

To avoid increasing your number of never active prospects in the system, push your prospects to take one of the three actions that would move them to be considered an active prospect. Some best practices to achieve this include:

1. Ensure your first touchpoint for a prospect cookies their browser. This could be as simple as making sure prospects are entering your system via a form or form handler that is connected to Account Engagement.
2. Include clear Calls to Action in your emails that encourage the prospect to click on a link. This could include a “learn more” button that takes the prospect to an Account Engagement landing page or your website to find out more about the subject of your email.
3. Create a re-engagement campaign to target these prospects. This could involve creating a dynamic list of never active prospects that feeds an Engagement Studio Program, sending the prospects emails to drive them to click on a link or visit a landing page with a form for them to provide more information about themselves.
4. Utilize automation tools in Account Engagement to streamline communications and follow-ups with prospects. This will save your team time from manually trying to encourage these prospects to take a qualifying action to become active.
5. If all else fails, remove prospects in the system who are never active after attempting to engage them. Save room in your system for those who want to be active with your organization!

Recommendations

Some additional recommendations that can help reduce the number of never active prospects are:

1. Create a dynamic list of never active prospects. You can do this by creating a list where “prospect last activity was X days ago.” Then, you could create an Engagement Studio Program with a series of nurture emails where the goal is for them to click on a link in the email.
   • You can also take this a step further by creating a landing page and adding a small form on the page. Then, send the link to the landing page in an email with some verbiage about wanting to get to know them better or obtain more information about them. The goal is for them to click on the link, go to the landing page, and fill out the form.
2. Remove never active prospects from the org. Once you send a few emails to your never active prospects and they still don’t take any action to become active, create a new list for these prospects. Once a quarter or a few times a year, send the prospects on the list to the recycle bin. You can do this for an entire list by taking a table action on the list and sending the whole list to the recycle bin.

By regularly reviewing and managing unmailable and never active prospects, you can not only improve your database’s overall health but also optimize your marketing efforts. Implementing best practices and recommendations will help keep your prospects engaged, reduce the clutter in your system, and ultimately lead to more meaningful interactions.