There are several reasons why a contact may have an inactive status:
- Hard bounce: A hard bounce is an incorrect email address; it is misspelled or the address no longer exists. After sending a mailing to this address, a hard bounce immediately goes into the inactive file.
- Soft bounce: A soft bounce is a contact with an unreachable email address. After multiple mailings with the status Soft bounce, the contact ends up in the inactive file.
- Opt-out: When a contact unsubscribes via the unsubscribe link in your email message and this results in a full opt-out status, the contact receives an inactive status.
- Feedback loop: When an email message is perceived as unwanted, a contact may decide they no longer want to receive it. This is often done via an unsubscribe link or the mailing can be marked as spam by the contact. Spotler has agreements with several major email providers such as Hotmail and Gmail to respect these spam reports. This means that a contact in Spotler becomes inactive if a mailing sent from Spotler is marked as spam.
Manually made inactive: It is possible that a contact has been manually made inactive via the contacts tab in the Lists module.
A contact in the inactive file can no longer be emailed.