So the other week I went and deleted half my email marketing list.
You may think I am a crazy person. What? She just deleted half her list!?! You probably are still fussing over that one client who unsubscribed last week? Yeah you need to let that go and read this post here.
On the quest to get more subscribers, it may seem a little counter-intuitive to wipe out a large chunk of potential customers, but there is a method to my madness. It wasn’t some random act of deleting because I didn’t like the ‘look’ of their email, and to be clear, my email list is not massive.
Goodbye inactive users
So there were a bunch of users that I noticed had signed up to my list via my website, and NEVER EVER EVER opened my emails. It’s likely they signed up for the wrong reasons or with a dummy email just to get my free stuff. It’s also very likely they had no intention of buying from me or perhaps they were competitors who finally decided to put their eyes on their own work. My goal isn’t a big list of useless email addresses, I want an engaged list of people who are interested in what I am putting out to the world.
Mailchimp has some pretty cool features to help you cut out the dead wood – you can find instructions here on how to easily remove your inactive subscribers.
I don’t recommend doing this if you have only just started sending emails, this for me was historically 12 months of inactivity.
Direction changed
When I noticed my engagement rate had dropped (as in lower percentage of opens and clicks) I had a look at who wasn’t opening, I noticed a massive trend to subscribers who signed up for an offering that I no longer offer. My business is not a tattoo and I am constantly evolving and changing, some offers were just not relevant to certain people anymore so it makes perfect sense that they don’t want to hear what I have to say. This is why it’s so helpful to implement groups and segments in your list to find out where they are coming from, and potentially instead of deleting users entirely you could provide more targeted content for that particular demographic.
Costing me money
People really forget this, but I worked it out that each user is costing me 30c per year to be on my list. If these people aren’t even opening my emails, then it’s probably best for both parties that I just remove the subscriber. By clearing out those inactive users your return on investment is way higher!
Making room for the new
Even though I wiped out all of these subscribers I have managed to get them back. And it only took a week, I know some weird manifesting weirdness going on there, but no, that wasn’t it. I just put my focus onto creating something of use to my target audience and put it out to the world. If you focus on providing good quality content, stuff that people need, stuff that people want, growing your list isn’t that hard.
The end of the year is the perfect time to clear out the old to make way for the new!
If you want more tips for marketing your business come join me for a FREE 21 day challenge, kicks off on 1st of January 2015!
Oh man, this makes total sense! I must admit, its damn disheartening to see that less that 50% of my list has opened a campaign. Might just have to have a look at this…
Another way you could do it is to actively invite people to unsubscribe if you’re scared to delete away!