In the world of email marketing, it might be easy to take things a little too personal. When looking at your list of email subscribers, you may think that every single person on your list is like a friend who reached out and specifically said “Yes, I’d love to hear from you!” The trouble is though, that over time friends can often lose touch with one another, try and make plans to reconnect and fail, life gets busy and they forget to reply to that text message you sent a week ago asking if they wanted to catch up over brunch that weekend. Or maybe you even run into each other at the grocery store where they ask if you have a coupon for their favorite brand of crisps, only to see their deflated smiles when you tell them you don’t.
Is it time to cut ties?
With email marketing, the idea of “list pruning” aka removing subscribers from your list is again, a very personal choice. I have met some gurus who suggest you never remove anyone from your list while others have a staunch rule of removing after six months of no engagement.
Oof, sounds kind of rough, doesn’t it?
My recommendation however is a bit of a balanced approach. I do suggest list pruning on a regular basis. In fact, if you have the option to set up an automation within your email marketing platform, such as MailChimp for example, you can set up an automation for anyone on your list who has not engaged with your campaigns within 2 years (my recommended time frame).
Within that email you can try and send what is known as a reactivation campaign, which is what you call a campaign when you are trying to reengage with subscribers who once interacted with your emails but no longer do. This type of campaign can be a simple “Just checking in, did you still want to receive our emails?” to a medium approach of “Reaching out to offer a discount code to see if anything peaks your interest” or even a more complicated series of emails involving A/B testing of different subject lines and content to try and capture a previous subscriber’s attention.
If a subscriber does not engage with said email, you can opt to then have them permanently removed from your list. Finto Fini. Finished.
Why should I remove subscribers?
You may be wondering exactly why someone would want to remove subscribers from your list. There could be several reasons why, let’s get into a few of them.
- Cost: Most email marketing platforms will charge you for the number of subscribers you have. If you’re a small business, you do not want to be paying for potentially hundreds of subscribers if they are not bringing in sales over a certain length of time.
- Privacy Rules: With email marketing, privacy and spam rules should always be in the forefront of your mind. While GDPR was created with the EU in mind, it very much affects organizations around the globe. EU subscribers have the right to be removed from your database and you must have proof that you have their consent to receive your emails – which is important in case you ever audited.
- Improves your open and click thru rates: By removing your inactive subscribers, your overall open rates and click thru rates will improve, allowing you to not only have more accurate reporting, but in the case where you may have collaboration or sell ad space in your emails, it allows you to provide a higher and more accurate rate of engagement to your clients.
- Improves overall list health: To email clients like gmail, outlook, apple mail, etc., you have what’s known as a sending reputation. When an email is sent out, if the sender’s sending reputation is ranked poor, it can often cause emails to be flagged as spam, filtered into junk folders, or rejected completely. If you’re sending your emails to inactive subscribers or worse, invalid emails addresses, it can create bounces. Too many bounces and it hurts your reputation. By reviewing your list to ensure you have healthy and accurate email addresses, you can help keep your account in a healthy status.
Conclusion
Parting may be such sweet sorrow, try and remember that parting can also improve your sending reputation, help improve your reporting, keep you compliant with industry standards, and also help save you money.
If you find yourself removing a large amount of subscribers, try not to panic. I’ve got some tips in an upcoming post to talk about how you can take a few easy steps to find new subscribers and how to continue to keep them engaged.