People freak out when I tell them to drop people. “Maybe they’ll eventually open my emails.” “Oh but I worked so hard to get them on my list!” – to do what – not open up your messages and ignore you? You worked hard for people to ignore your messages… and want to continue to pay for them to be on your list? C’mon.
I always tell my students who take my courses, “You’re PAYING for people to be on your email list. So if they’re not opening up your emails, why pay ‘rent’ for them?”
Update 1/17/2019 – I happily deleted 15k people from my list last night! Woot Woot!
Clean your email list up on a monthly basis. I just did mine last night again. I dumped another 2410 people who had not opened my last 5 emails (this is a good practice and amount to base your clean-up on).
Here are some money-saving and creative reasons to dump your non-readers:
- You might get a bump down in monthly fees with your 3rd party email subscription company for your list if you clean it regularly. This saves you money… allowing you to invest those savings into something else.
- Creatively, these are people that genuinely are not interested in what you have to say. They can go. You only want people who are interested. To have the mindset that someone will eventually open up your emails after you’ve sent them 5, 10, 20+ emails, is misguided. They’re 99% NOT going to open them. For whatever reason, they landed on your list and just have been hovering there, not reading a single word. To expect them to suddenly start opening and reading you is the definition of insanity – expecting a different result with the same process.
- Statistically, you’ll want to have a better idea of just how effective your email writing is. You’ll want high open rates, and the only way to gauge that is to clean your list so you don’t have the bottom non-opening people weighing down your stats. You’ll want conversion, too, not just opens. And the only way to really determine how you’re doing is to look at your stats carefully and what people are clicking on.
Don’t make the mistake that involves an element of vanity and keep people on your list just to make it look big. It’s better to have a smaller, much more engaged list of people that convert (for a lower advertising cost) than it is to have a huge list with a 1% click rate.
Just remember – you’re paying for the people on your list. Either they open, or they go. If they find you again and start opening up your emails, bonus. But until they start opening and clicking, kick them off your list because you don’t need to be paying for non-responsive subscribers.
Happy emailing, everyone!
Now, delete all those non-openers and tell them “be gone!”