I try to cull my list every three months, ESPECIALLY when I’m doing a lot of email growth activities, because you will get LOTS of new people on your list quickly and then many of them will be duds.
So many people I talk to are scared to cull their list for fear of losing good subscribers.
Are they “good subscribers” though?
Yesterday, I sent emails out to 6,600 people who hadn’t opened an email since the beginning of August from my main author list, and 1,400 people who hadn’t opened an email since September on my author email list.
I asked them very politely if they would like to stay and even gave them a free book if they chose to stay. I have no interest in cutting people from my list and want to give them EVERY option to stay if they want to be on the list.
Out of 7,500 people, 13 people took that option, while only 198 people opened those emails.
This is my email to my author email subscribers.
This is my email to people who weren’t opening my emails for this site.
That’s a 2% open rate, which is dreadful. It affects deliverability. It affects where email programs put you. Most importantly, it affects morale.
I want people on my list that WANT to be there. Not just people who don’t care if they are there, but ACTIVELY want to be there.
I’ve long thought that even when my list was growing fast that there were 10,000-15,000 “good” subscribers on my list, and now that I’ve stopped doing hyper-growth activities for a while, I can see that I was right.
For your own sanity, you really don’t want people on your list that don’t want to be there. If nothing else, it makes your email less fun to write when people aren’t opening it and engaging with you. I find it so hard to send emails when I don’t have a good open rate because I expect that the people who gets those emails are EXCITED to read it.
That’s one of my secrets. It’s easy to write to people who WANT to hear from you. When they don’t, it makes things much harder.
UPDATE:
Follow-up from the purge. Two weeks ago I sent two emails to my various lists.
I sent a purge email to 6,508 people on my Wannabe Press (WP) list and 1,443 people on my The Complete Creative (TCC) list.
Out of that 7,951 emails, only 22 people ended up choosing to remain on those lists, a total of .28%.
Probably a good idea for them to leave the list, right?
So, did that change anything with my opens? Well, in the second chart above, I have shared my last three email sends – one before the purge, and two after the purge.
In the first email to my WP list, from before the purge, I had 2,403 opens. In the first email after the purge, I had 2,811 emails, a 16% INCREASE. In the second email after the purge, I had 2,334, a 2.87% decrease from before the purge.
For my TCC list, the email before the purge, I had 466 opens. In the first email after the purge, I had 412 opens, an 11.59% decrease. In the second email after the purge, I had 428 emails, an 8.15% decrease.
My emails have at least a 10% variance from email to email, and it’s probably more like 20% or more. Given that, the only email that would fall outside of that 10% variance would be the first email after the purge on my TCC list.
Please remember that I go through and make sure I’m not getting rid of anybody who has backed my previous campaign, or anybody I can trace back to buyers in the past, but I think I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I don’t feel like I got rid of any, or many people who were engaging with my work.
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