Why I Deleted 1000 Email Subscribers Last Week...
Last week I deleted nearly 1,000 subscribers off my email list.
…Even though my goal for this year is to grow my email list and I’ve been working really hard on doing just that over the past 6 months. So why on Earth did I do it?
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First of all, we need to talk about open rates and deliverability…
Your email ‘Open Rate’ is the % of people who opened your email, from the total number of people you sent it to (eg. 30%). So you might have an email list of 1,000 subscribers that you send your email newsletter to, but not all of these subscribers will actually open it.
It depends on a range of factors including what industry you’re in, but typically 15% - 25% would an average Open Rate, 25% - 35% is considered pretty good, and 40%+ is exceptional!
Reasons for people not opening your emails can include:
Your email has been marked as spam (depending on individual spam filters and the content of your email)
Your email has ‘bounced’ (if someone inputs their email incorrectly or has a full inbox)
Your email subject line wasn’t interesting / click-worthy enough to entice people to open it
The people not opening your emails just aren’t interested in you as a business
Over time as your list grows, your Open Rate will naturally decline because you’re bound to get more and more people on your list who maybe aren’t your target client and aren’t the perfect fit for your content. And that’s okay!
BUT, sitting by while your Open Rate declines without doing anything can have a negative impact on you and your marketing…
The Cost of your email service provider will increase
If you are using an Email Service Provider such as Mailchimp or Convertkit, you will be subject to their ‘dynamic pricing’, whereby as your email list grows and you get more subscribers, these companies will charge you more for their email marketing services. There was a point where I had around 10,000 subscribers using Convertkit, and was paying around £150 a month!
To mitigate this issue, I’d recommend using an Email Service Provider like Flodesk instead. Flodesk is what I use and what I encourage all my clients to use, for lots of different reasons but one of the main ones being they have a fixed price structure. This means that no matter how many email subscribers you have, your cost stays the same.
Currently, Flodesk is available for $38USD per month, but you can get 50% off (for your first year) if you use my affiliate link, making it just $19USD per month - no matter how many subscribers you have!
Flodesk Affiliate Link: https://flodesk.com/c/00G2QH
Learn more about Flodesk and the comparisons between Mailchimp & Flodesk
But regardless of what software you’re using, there’s another very good reason why you don’t want to let your Open Rate go into decline…
When people stop opening your emails, your sender trust-factor decreases…
Email clients (eg. Gmail, Yahoo etc - where your subscribers are accessing their emails) are very sophisticated nowadays, and obviously want to give their customers the best experience. They can see whether someone hasn’t opened emails from a certain company in a while, and will therefore consider that the person is no longer interested in their newsletters.
From my research, it seems that if someone doesn’t open three or more of your emails in a row, this is when Gmail/Yahoo will start to register a disinterest. Once they see this, they’re more likely to mark any of your future emails as spam, or hide your email in the ‘Promotions’ folder - which people rarely check.
This is obviously to help keep their customers’ inboxes clean and uncluttered with promotions from companies they think they don’t want to see, but it means that this subscriber is even more unlikely to open any of your future emails.
BUT that’s not all.
When we set up our email marketing software, we use a ‘sender address’ to send our email newsletters from, which is linked to your domain (eg. my domain is byrosanna.co.uk, so my email sender address is my email address - contact@byrosanna.co.uk). All sender addresses will have a ‘trust factor’ associated with them, which helps email clients (like Gmail etc) to determine whether a sender is trustworthy or not or whether it’s a spammy account. Again, this is all to help filter spam out of our inboxes!
But each time your emails are marked with spam, or put in the promotions folder, or regularly NOT opened by your list, you get a ‘black mark’ against the trust factor of your sender address.
And this in turn means that when you send emails to other subscribers on your list, their own email clients are more likely to mark you as spam, or put you in the promotions folder etc. So it’s a vicious circle that results in a declining Open Rate… which isn’t good because these people might actually be your target audience and be interested in you!
So this is why we have to delete the people who really aren’t interested…
But how do we go about doing this?
No matter what email service provider you’re using, you should be able to filter your email subscribers based on when they last opened an email from you, so you’ll need to do that and create a new segment of people who haven’t opened any emails from you in - say - the last 2 months.
Now, instead of deleting these people straight away, what I’d suggest is doing a ‘re-engagement campaign’ first.
Essentially, sending them an email that basically says ‘hey - I’m about to delete you, please let me know if you want to stay on this list!’ (but in nicer words, obviously!). You can ask them to click a link to indicate they want to stay, and anyone who doesn’t click that link within a couple of days, you can then go ahead and delete.
…And that is why I ended up deleting just under 1000 people off my list last week!
This is probably something I’d recommend doing every 6 months or so, and while it may feel scary, it can be hugely beneficial for the overall health of your list! I’m already seeing a big Open Rate and Click Rate increase in my emails which is great.
