You are:
The Hoarder:
- Strategy: Never cleans her list. Has 60,000 subscribers, but a steadily declining open rate that’s now in the single digits.
- Frequently heard saying: “They might open an email someday! You never know!”
- What you think others are doing wrong: Throwing away perfectly good subscribers. Maybe they’re reading your emails in the Preview pane!
You worked hard – and maybe even handed over a fair amount of money – to get all those subscribers, and the thought of unsubscribing any of them gives you hives. So you tell yourself that they’ll open and click one day, or maybe they already are and you just can’t see it!
Well, I’ve got bad news: They’re just not that into you.
The number of people who click to stay during a re-engagement campaign is usually in the tenths-of-a-percent range; all those non-openers are doing is costing you unnecessary money and dragging down your deliverability rates. Cut ’em loose! You need Chapter 18 of Newsletter Ninja.
You need subscribers who want to be on your list, and who show it by opening, clicking, and replying. You do not need to pay your mailing list service for dead weight that isn’t interested in you.
This can sometimes mean culling a large number of people, particularly if you don’t do it regularly. Suck it up, cupcake, and do it anyway. (And then come sit by us oldsters and talk about the great GDPR debacle of 2018; it’ll make your wound look like a paper cut.) Whatever sales you lose from removing the few people who might have come around and begun opening your emails again is more than offset by the net gain in open and click rates, and the subsequent positive effects on your reputation as a sender. Just tell yourself they can always rejoin if they want to, and toss them overboard.
Dump the extra weight, keep your list lean and engaged, and it will continue to perform for you even as it gets bigger and bigger. And that is, after all, the whole point.
You can download a PDF of this result [here].
If you want to know more, there are several options! You can buy the book here. You can check out available courses here. You can join the Facebook group, the Think Tank, here.
Or you can just hang around and wait for me to lay some tips and tricks on you every Tuesday. We’re very laid-back over here at Newsletter Ninja HQ, and just not that interested in the hard sell. Relax. You’re among friends, and you belong here.