Cleaning up old or inactive contacts without deleting them
Deleting contacts who haven't done anything in a long time feels like tidying up. In Leat it usually costs you more than it saves: on most plans an inactive contact costs you nothing to keep, and they're exactly the contacts you want to be able to measure when they come back.
This article explains why, what deleting actually removes, and how to get the same result without losing that history.
Inactive contacts don't use tokens
Tokens are used when something happens: a points transaction, a voucher redemption, a gift card or prepaid transaction, or an email being sent (1 token per 100 emails). A contact sitting in your database uses none.
So if the goal is to stop spending tokens on people who don't respond, the fix is who you send to, not who's in your database. Leave them out of your campaign audience and they cost you nothing.
When the number of contacts does count
On two kinds of plan, the number of contacts matters:
- The free plan has a contact limit, and every contact counts towards it, active or inactive. Once you reach it, no new contacts can be added until you upgrade.
- Some older subscriptions are priced by number of contacts. You can tell under Settings → Subscription: the page shows Number of contacts used instead of token usage. Only active contacts count there, so contacts marked inactive (see Mark them inactive below) bring that number down without being deleted.
Why Leat needs the contacts who aren't active
Leat is built to show how your loyalty program performs for your contacts over time, and that includes the ones who drifted away. A quiet contact today is the comeback you want to measure tomorrow.
When an inactive contact places an order again, redeems a reward or reacts to an email, that comeback lands on the profile they already have. You can see what they received before they came back, which reward they used, and in a segment you can see them move from Lost or Hibernating back up. That's how you find out which promotions actually win people back.
Delete them, and none of that is possible. If they return, they come back as a brand-new contact with no history, and their comeback looks like a first visit.
What deleting a contact does
Deleting a contact can't be undone.
Removed for good: the profile and its attributes, the points balance, tier, subscription statuses, list memberships, visits, bookings, form submissions, prepaid transactions, referral codes and automation history.
Kept, but no longer linked to anyone: loyalty transactions, orders, vouchers, gift cards and email statistics. Your totals stay correct, but you can no longer see who they belonged to.
A contact who still has a prepaid balance can't be deleted.
Deleting an unsubscribed contact can resubscribe them
When you delete a contact, the record that they unsubscribed is deleted with them. If the same email address comes back later, it's created as a new contact. Through a contact import, it gets the subscriptions chosen in that import's Marketing step. Any other way, for example a new sign-up, it starts out subscribed to your opt-out and functional subscription types.
Keeping an unsubscribed contact is what keeps them unsubscribed.
What to do instead
- Leave them out of your campaigns. Build a dynamic list of the contacts you do want to reach, for example contacts subscribed to marketing who have ordered or earned points, and send to that list. See Creating a contact list.
- Mark them inactive. Lifecycle marks contacts as inactive when they match a set of filters. Turn on the Lifecycle feature under Settings → General, in Features; a Lifecycle section then appears under Settings → Contacts (only admins see this item) with your number of active and inactive contacts. Activating Lifecycle and setting its filters is done by the Leat team, so contact us with the rule you want. Contacts are checked every night and whenever something happens on their profile, so a contact who becomes active again is marked active again on their own. You can filter on Status in your lists.
- Watch who comes back. A Recency or RFM segment under CRM → Segments groups contacts by how recently they were active. Its History tab shows how many contacts moved between segments, and which segments they came from. See How to create a CRM segment.
- Try to win them back. The Retention email preset under Marketing → Recurring emails emails contacts who haven't visited in a while. See Recurring emails: setting one up, and every option.
When deleting is the right call
- A contact asks you to remove their data.
- Test contacts you created yourself.
- Your own data-retention policy requires it.
Two contacts that are really the same person shouldn't be deleted either: merge them, so the history ends up on one profile. See Merging two contacts, and what happens to their data.
To delete a contact, see How to delete a contact. Contacts are deleted one at a time; there's no bulk delete in the dashboard. If you need to remove a large group, for example after a data-retention review, contact us.