Why I Removed 2,200 Email Subscribers from My List (and How to Clean Your Email List)

Welcome back to the show. Today we’ll talk about email marketing. Lately I’m taking more radical action in my business and am sharing more of what goes behind the scenes. So today’s big move is cleaning my email list, and removing half of my subscribers. Tune in below: Show Notes: * What are cold subscribers and how they hurt your business * Why clean your email list * Why people join your list but don’t open emails * What I found out when I cleaned my email list * How to determine who’s a cold subscriber * How to send a re-engagement campaign Mentioned: * ConvertKit * Teachable Transcript Removing half of your subscribers might sound crazy to some of you. Maybe you’re scared to remove anyone from your list, even if they haven’t engaged with your emails, because maybe one day they will. Or maybe one day they will even buy your course or work 1:1 with you. That shows you’re trying to please everyone and you’re willing to have an audience of people who aren’t interested in what you have to say or sell, and yet you wanna keep entertaining them. What’s more, you wanna keep them on your precious email list where you form close connections with people, and you wanna pay for them, as email marketing tools aren’t cheap. In fact, the annual payment for my provider is one of the biggest expenses in my business. Now that I did an email list cleanup it’s less. What are cold subscribers? If you’re wondering what a cleanup is, that simply means removing the so called cold subscribers from your list, the ones who haven’t opened your emails for a long time, or ever. Some might be bots, others might be people who don’t use that email address anymore, or aren’t interested. It can also be people who never received the email. These are called email bounces and some reasons might be a full inbox or a changed address. In an ideal world, they would all manually unsubscribe from our list. But the reality is different. People sign up to all kinds of newsletters only to remain inactive. And we keep sending them emails and providing value but no one is there to receive it. There’s more to that, though. This can actually negatively affect our business. We can get spam complaints. If people keep getting emails from you, don’t know how to unsubscribe or don’t even wanna open them and are annoyed, they can mark them as spam. Providers like Gmail take that into consideration and if you get many of these complains, they will start sending your emails to everyone’s spam folder. That means many of your engaged subscribers will either miss out on them, or if they find them,