Why Removing People from Your Email List Will Make You More Money

I hope your weekend was better than mine. I spent the majority of my Saturday in my front lawn. I hauled bag after bag of mulch and soil from Home Depot to my house. I was on my hands and knees pulling weeds, spraying fertilizer and planting seeds. By the end of the day my back hurt but my lawn looked great.

I realized that although yard work is rough, the result is worth it. A little maintenance and care goes a long way. In another week or two my lawn will be velvety green, there won’t be any “dead” spots in my grass, the flowers will be filled in and beautiful and I will be proud of my yard. Your email list works much the same way. Give it a little regular TLC and you’ll see improved response rates and ultimately make more money.

For online business owners your email list is your most important asset. It’s how you make your money. Continually building and adding to your list is a task successful business owners spend a lot of time on. Your ultimate goal is to build the biggest list of subscribers you can. The more subscribers you have, the more money you will make in theory.

Growing your list is important, but subscribers who don’t open your emails or engage with you don’t do you any good. In all actuality they cost you money. The larger your list, the more your email broadcast service will charge you. If these contacts aren’t reading your emails or buying from you why keep them around? Performing a list cleaning once or twice a year will remove the dead weight.

I myself just got done performing a cleaning on one of my businesses subscriber lists. In the process I removed 50,000 names! A very large amount of subscribers I’m sure you’ll agree. The one thing I did and I recommend you do too is not to throw away those names you clean from your list. Instead remove them from your list and create a new list with these names.

You want to have large lists, but you want them to be targeted. Sometimes large lists can lose that specificity and you end up sending vague messages hoping to appeal to everyone. Think of a clothing retailer like Macy’s or JCPenny’s. They have subscriber list sizes in the millions. It costs them a lot of money to send emails. Instead of putting all of their subscribers on one main list, they break them down into more targeted lists. They wouldn’t benefit by emailing subscribers who have only ever bought women’s clothes about the men’s new spring fashion line. That would be a waste of time.

Instead of having one large list that includes everyone, organize your subscribers into separate lists. This way you can tailor messages to each group. Macy’s only emails their subscribers about the things that matter most to them. Ultimately this reduces their sending costs, keeps their response rate high and increases sales. You should do the same.

Part of cleaning your list includes removing those email addresses that bounce back. Messages that bounce back are ones that have a typo in it, have an out-of-office responder activated or because the recipient’s inbox is full. No matter what email service provider you use, they should be giving you a bounce list. It should give you a list of all email addresses and tell you what your bounce rate is. Ideally you want to be under a two percent bounce rate. Once you get in the five percent range you risk getting labeled as spam.

Being labeled as a spammer is a big deal. Big ISP’s like Yahoo and AOL may label you as a spammer if you repeatedly try sending emails to addresses that bounce or are no longer valid. Spammers get blacklisted by ISP’s which will ultimately block you from sending to further emails to people on your list.

Next time you get your bounce report go through the list and check for obvious errors like typos and spelling mistakes. Look for errors like aolcom instead of aol.com or yahoo!.com instead of yahoo.com. Check for spelling mistakes like simpatico instead of sympatico and commcast.net instead of comcast.net. Fixing the obvious mistakes in email addresses is a free way to keep valid subscribers on your list.

When you do a list cleaning remove those subscribers who have not opened an email from you in over six months. These are the dead weight of your list. Now email broadcasters will tell you to remove anyone who hasn’t opened an email from you in the last four months. I think that is a little aggressive. I go back six months.

Like I said before I never really throw away any email addresses, as long as they are valid. I simply move subscribers who haven’t opened an email from me in six months to another list. I don’t send the same content and promotions to this list as I do my clean list. I send them content that had high open rates in the past in hopes of getting them to engage with me once again. I will send them other messages warning them that their account will be closed if they don’t confirm their subscription. Each time I get a response I move them back to the original list.

A little bit of list maintenance can really go a long way. It may seem counter intuitive to regularly remove subscribers from your email marketing list, but it’s not. Ultimately if you perform a regular list clean up and remove the dead weight from your list you’ll end up with a list of recent buyers, who open your emails, engage with you and are responsive. Your list will be smaller, but it will be way better.

Good luck!

Ethan Warrick


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