Maintaining a healthy, engaged subscriber list is critical for strong email deliverability, higher open and click rates, and better overall performance from your email campaigns. Over time, some subscribers will stop engaging with your emails—continuing to message them can negatively impact your sender reputation and cause more of your emails to land in spam.

Also, as a best practice when moving subscriber lists from one platform to another, never move over your unengaged subscribers.

This guide outlines how to identify unengaged subscribers using Flodesk’s filtering tools and how to manage them in line with email marketing best practices.

Unengaged subscribers are people who consistently ignore your emails. These contacts haven’t opened or clicked on your campaigns over a defined period of time, even though they are still technically subscribed. They may have:

• Stopped opening your emails altogether

• Never clicked on any links in your emails

• Lost interest in your content

• Changed email addresses without unsubscribing

Continuing to email these subscribers hurts your engagement rates and signals to inbox providers (like Gmail or Outlook) that your emails aren’t valuable—this can reduce deliverability for everyone on your list, even your most loyal readers.

Cleaning your list regularly helps signal to mailbox providers like Gmail that recipients are excited to see your messages in their inboxes, making them less likely to filter them out or send them to spam.

There’s no one-size-fits-all definition. Always adjust criteria based on your emailing freqency.

Depending on your sending behavior, here are a few methods you can use to identify an unengaged subscriber in your audience. 

Note: you shouldn’t use all these criteria at once to filter your list.

Adjust based on how often you send emails. For example, if you email weekly, use a 90-day window. If monthly, consider 6 months or more (<< coming soon!)

You can identify unengaged subscribers by applying filters in your Flodesk account.

1. Go to Audience > All Subscribers

2. Click the Filter (top right, next to “Add subscriber”)

3. The filter panel will slide out from the right—this is where you’ll build your filter criteria

4. Once you set your filters, hit Apply to view the results

Important: Depending on your audience and sending frequency, you can increase or decrease the time frames and message thresholds. 

NOTE: the below are just examples, not hard rules. 

Example 1: Subscribers who are active, are receiving emails, but have never opened or clicked on your emails.

• Subscriber status: Active

• Emails delivered: more than 5 in the last 90 days (adjust this depending on your sending frequency)

• Emails opened: 0 times over all time

• Emails clicked: 0 times over all time

Example 2: Subscribers who are active, are receiving emails, have opened some emails, but have stopped engaging recently.

• Subscriber status: Active

• Emails delivered: more than 5 over all time

• Open rate: lower than 10%

• Click rate: 0%

• Last activity: not in the last 90 days

After applying filters, you can use the Select All checkbox to take bulk actions:

Add to segment - Choose the segment(s) from the drop-down you want to add the selected subscriber(s) to. You can also create a segment by starting to type the new segment’s name.

For example, You can add unengaged subscribers to a dedicated new segment called e.g. “unengaged”.

To avoid sending them further emails, exclude this segment from your email campaigns/newsletters and your active workflows.

Remove from segment - Choose the segment(s) you want to remove the selected subscriber(s) from - without deleting them from your entire list

Unsubscribe from your entire list

Delete permanently from your entire list

Before removing unengaged subscribers you can give them one last chance to engage. A re-engagement (or “win-back”) campaign is a one-time email or sequence designed to get unengaged subscribers to take action.

What to include:

• A reminder of who you are and why they subscribed

• A special incentive (discount, freebie, early access)

• A call-to-action (update preferences, confirm they still want emails)

• A clear option to unsubscribe if they’re no longer interested

 Use Flodesk’s Subscriber Re-engagement Sequence template to make this easy.

Note: If you only want to delete a subscriber from a specific segment (not the entire list), use Remove from segment.

Cleaning your list is not about losing subscribers—it’s about keeping the ones who want to hear from you.

• Define “unengaged” based on activity: opens, clicks, and recency

• Use Flodesk Filters to identify low- or no-engagement contacts

• Try a re-engagement campaign to bring them back

• Unsubscribe or delete those who remain inactive

• Maintain this process regularly (e.g., every 3–6 months)

A smaller, more engaged list performs better than a larger, unresponsive one.