How to Boost Your Open Rate With Spring Cleaning:
A few other Substackers have asked me for information on this. I decided to put together a quick guide based on what I learned after an army of spam bots filled my email list, and dropped my open rate below 10%.
1. UNDERSTANDING SENDER SCORE
Have you ever wondered why some newsletters you subscribe to go to your primary inbox, while others are classified as spam or promotions?
Every time you open an email, it sends back a tiny piece of data called a chit. Email providers use this information to build a kind of digital reputation around you. If you have a good reputation (I.e. lots of people open your stuff,) email providers will be more inclined to send future mail to the primary inbox.
If you have a bad reputation (lots of people unsubscribe, report you as spam, or you have a low open rate,) your emails are more likely to go to the junk folder.
2. LIST DECLUTTERING
With this in mind, you probably get where I’m going: having a bunch of names on your mailing list that NEVER open your email doesn’t benefit you. In fact, it hurts you.
But email data isn’t infallible. You don’t want to boot readers just because data says they don’t read your stuff. I have a ton of followers who see my email, never open it, but treat it as a nudge to go check out my stuff on the website.
So we need to weed out the actual followers, from the names we’re deleting.
3. RUNNING THE SEARCH
We do this on the writer dashboard. Pop over to the “subscribers” tab. Scroll down to the search function. We’re going to create a specific search to weed out inactive users. Each of these is a separate search criteria. You’re going to stack all of these together, in order to find the people who are TOTALLY inactive. Search by:
Email opens all time < 1 and
Web page views all time < 1 and
Comments all time < 1 and
Activity < 1 star and
Sign up date before 3 months ago
Export this list.
Clear your search, and make a new one.
A bit simpler:
Dropped emails > 0
A dropped email means for some reason, Substack tried to send a message and it physically could not be delivered. This could be for a couple reasons: invalid address, full inbox, etc.
(Not to brag but I actually am directly responsible for this feature being added to Substack’s UI.)
Export this list too.
4. ZERO BOUNCE
Now we’re going to see if the problem is with you, or the inbox. We can’t just reach through the computer, grab someone by the collar and shake them, demanding to know why they’re not reading. Not yet anyway.
First we want to see if these email addresses are even real, or possibly malicious. There are several reasons someone may sign up to you with a fake email. The result is the same: digital clutter.
I use a verification service called zero bounce. It pings addresses to see if they are valid. The service does cost money, based on how many names you want to verify. That’s why we’ve whittled down the list first.
Upload your list to zero bounce, and wait for it to churn out a report.
5 UNDERSTANDING RESULTS
zero bounce gives you an interesting picture. It will sort these emails into valid/invalid. Their website goes into a bit more detail why. But you’ll probably want to just remove the invalid emails from your list.
6. THE FINAL TEST
The “valid” emails are trickier. We don’t want to remove actual fans. But sending out an email to a bunch of people who probably won’t open it... could hurt your sender score.
That’s why we’re going to use another third party service... mail meteor. This will let you draft a quick email to those valid but inactive subscribers. Explain in a polite email that you’re the creator of your newsletter, and noticed they haven’t opened anything in X amount of time. Explain that you don’t want to fill their inbox if they’re no longer interested in your content, but don’t want to remove them if it’s a data error. Tell them that you will automatically remove them in a few days if they don’t reply.
7. RESULTS (below. I’m getting cut off)