Clean up people you can never email
A database is not an audience. Audience health separates the people you can actually email from the ones who are counted, stored and often billed for while being unreachable, and it names the fields it read each number from. Removing the cost is a change you make in your own tool: MarqIQ measures it and will not delete anything. If the problem is junk arriving rather than old records sitting there, read Cut junk form fills at the source.
Before you start
Plan required
Any plan except Starter. Audience health sits on the Analysis screen.
Permissions required
Reading the numbers needs nothing beyond a connected tool. Changing a marketable status, suppressing people or deleting records is done in your tool, by whoever administers it.
- Your tool’s own opt-out and bounce fields. MarqIQ finds them by what they mean in your workspace rather than by a fixed list of names, and prints which ones it used.
- A last-open, last-click or last-reply date field, if you want the “still listening” half. Without one, MarqIQ says plainly that it cannot judge who is still listening rather than guessing.
- An export of anything you are about to remove, taken first.
Read the four tiles
Open Insights in the left-hand menu, then Analysis.
Pick the tool the people live in along the top.
Open the Audience health tab.
Read the four tiles: People, Can be emailed, Gone quiet or never engaged, and Paid for, unreachable.
Read the headline sentence above them.
It gives how many of how many can be emailed, and then either the share of reachable prospects who engaged within the last year or the reason that cannot be judged here.
This one is not a sample
Every figure on this tab covers every person synced from that tool, inside whatever Created range you have picked at the top of the screen. The counting is done in the database by grouping people on the seven facts the analysis judges — address, opt-out, bounce, billable status, customer or not, whether anything is recorded as engagement, and how long they have been in the tool — so however large the store, what comes back is a handful of weighted rows rather than a sample the screen then calls “the people in your tool”.
The three findings, and what each one needs
| Finding | What it is measured on | When it appears |
|---|---|---|
| People who can never be emailed but still count as marketing contacts | People with no address, an opt-out or a bounce, whose billable-status field still says they are marketing contacts | At least ten such people, and only where your tool has a billable-status field at all. Tagged Costing you now at 3% or more of everyone |
| The share who cannot be emailed | Everyone synced: no address, plus opt-outs, plus bounces | At least 100 people and 25% or more unreachable. Tagged Costing you now at 40% or more |
| The share who can be emailed and have stopped listening | Reachable people who are not customers | At least 100 such people and 30% or more of them quiet or never engaged. Tagged Costing you now at 50% or more |
The definitions, in full
- Reachable means an email address, no opt-out and no bounce. Nothing else is taken into account.
- Gone quiet means the most recent open, click or reply is more than 365 days old.
- Never engaged is counted only for people who have been in the tool for at least 180 days, so a new arrival is never blamed for silence.
- Customers are left out of both of those. A customer who ignores marketing email is still a customer, and is not a list problem.
- The denominator for the quiet finding is reachable people who are not customers, and the tab prints that number beside the share. Anything else quoting this group divides by the same number, so two screens cannot print different percentages for one group of people.
A field that exists and holds nothing cannot judge anybody
Where your tool has a last-engagement field and it is empty for everyone, MarqIQ says so and claims nothing — usually that means no marketing email has ever been sent from that tool. Silence in an empty field means “not recorded”, not “not listening”, and treating it as the second would suppress your whole list.
Check which fields the numbers came from
Open How this was worked out at the foot of the tab.
Read the first line.
It names, by label, the fields used for opt-out, for bounce, for last engagement and for billable status — or says “none found” for each one it could not find.
Check each named field is the one you would have chosen.
MarqIQ reads fields by what they mean in your workspace, not by a fixed list, and it deliberately avoids the fields that merely describe a status: its source, its type, its date, its reason. Where it has picked the wrong field, the count is wrong and you will see it here first.
Rebuild the same list in your tool using those field names.
The card prints this check for you. The count should come out close to the one on screen.
Note
Where no opt-out field or no bounce field is found, the finding says so in its own evidence line rather than leaving a zero to be misread. A zero and “no field to read” are different answers.
Decide what to archive and what to delete
Three outcomes, in increasing order of regret.
| Action | What it removes | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Set to non-marketing | The cost, where your tool bills by marketing contacts. The record, its history and its deals all stay | Someone has opted out, hard-bounced or has no address. This is the first move for almost everybody in the finding |
| Suppress from marketing email | The deliverability damage | Someone is reachable but has not engaged for a year, or never did. Do this after a re-permission sequence, not before it |
| Delete | The record and everything attached to it | Only for records with no history worth keeping, and only after an export. Nothing in MarqIQ wrote them, so nothing in MarqIQ can put them back |
MarqIQ will not delete a record for you
The two changes it can propose today fill empty first-touch fields on HubSpot and Marketo people; they cannot replace a value and they cannot remove a record. Every action in the table above is taken in your own tool.
Work it in the right order
Export the group you are about to change.
Set the never-reachable people to non-marketing first.
It removes nothing, costs nothing to reverse, and is where the billable count actually falls.
Check whether an automation already exists to do this.
On HubSpot, Marketo, Mailchimp, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce, MarqIQ lists your own automations whose names suggest this work — sunset, re-engage, win-back, inactive, unengaged, clean, suppress, non-marketing. The card says whether one is on, whether it was switched off, and whether your tool built it rather than your team. A group this size with such an automation switched on means it is not catching them.
Make it automatic before you move on.
When somebody opts out or hard-bounces, the same automation sets them to non-marketing. Otherwise the group rebuilds itself over a year.
Run a re-permission sequence to the quiet group before suppressing any of them.
Two or three emails over a fortnight, one clear offer, and an explicit “do you still want to hear from us?” in the last one.
Suppress the people who did not respond.
Suppress from marketing email, not delete. Their history is still worth having.
Send the never-engaged group nothing else until that has run.
They are the people most likely to mark you as spam, and mailbox providers judge your placement largely on them.
Tip
Report audience size as the reachable count wherever the total is used today: campaign targets, list-growth goals and the vendor tier are all being judged against people who are not there to be reached.
What this does and does not tell you about the bill
- MarqIQ quotes no price. Your tool’s bill depends on your contract, and this tab says how many records sit behind it.
- The billable count comes from your tool’s own billable-status field, read as a label: an empty value is counted as unknown rather than as billable, and values that read as non, false, 0 or no are counted as non-marketing.
- Where your tool has no such field, the Paid for, unreachable tile reads zero because there is nothing to read, not because nobody is being paid for. The method note says which it is.
- Where a lot of people have no email address at all, that is a separate problem with a separate fix: find the door that creates them — an import, a sales tool, a sync from another system — and make it require an address or stop creating contacts.
If it did not work
The headline says how many are still listening cannot be judged
Why: Either no field records when somebody last opened, clicked or replied, or such a field exists and holds nothing for anybody.
Fix: Where the field exists and is empty, it usually means no marketing email has been sent from this tool; connect the tool the email is actually sent from and read Audience health there. Where no field exists, the unreachable half of the tab still works and is the part to act on.
The Paid for, unreachable tile is zero and you know you are paying for them
Why: MarqIQ found no billable-status field on this tool, so there is nothing to count. Not every tool has one.
Fix: Read the method note to confirm it says “none found”, then use the unreachable count instead. That number is the one to take to a renewal conversation.
The count does not match the list you built in your tool
Why: The two lists are reading different fields, or your list includes customers where MarqIQ’s quiet counts exclude them.
Fix: Open How this was worked out, take the field labels it names, and rebuild your list from exactly those. Then check whether your list filters customers out, because the quiet and never-engaged figures always do.
MarqIQ named a field you would not have chosen
Why: Fields are matched on what their label means, and a workspace with several similar fields can have the wrong one picked.
Fix: Treat that finding as unproven and rebuild the count in your tool from the right field. Renaming the misleading field in your tool is the durable fix, because every screen here reads labels rather than internal names.
You want MarqIQ to set the non-marketing status for you
Why: The only changes MarqIQ proposes today fill empty first-touch fields on HubSpot and Marketo people. Nothing in the catalogue replaces a value or removes a record.
Fix: Make the change in your tool. Use the counts here to define the list and to check afterwards that it fell.
You deleted records and now want them back
Why: MarqIQ never wrote them, so it holds no before-value to restore and cannot reverse a deletion your tool has accepted.
Fix: Restore from your tool’s own recycle bin if it has one and the window is still open, or from the export you took. This is why the export comes first.
The numbers have not changed since the clean-up
Why: Audience health reads records already synced into your workspace, and the result it worked out is held on the server for five minutes.
Fix: Run a sync for that tool from Data sources, give the sync time to finish, then reload the page five minutes later. There is no re-read button on this tab, because the figures come from MarqIQ’s own copy rather than from a fresh call to your tool.
Next steps
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