I just cut almost 8,000 people from my email list and I am freaking out a bit.
I know you’re probably thinking “I don’t even have 8,000 emails” or “I would kiill for that many emails and you just threw them away”.
I have agonized about it for months, but there is a good reason.
Three months ago I comped them all 3-months and they haven’t opened even one email since then.
In fact, according to Substack’s activity they aren’t even one star. They are literally zero star subs.
How did they even get on my list? Well, I added them from another mailing list that I keep in Flodesk.
I added over 25,000 people from Flodesk here and I told myself even if they read ONE email, then I would keep them.
They read ZERO.
I know people have strong feelings about cutting people from your list, but I could have a list of 150,000 right now…but what is the use of that if nobody opens?
I guess I could go to sponsors and use it as bait, or I could at least have over 100,000 subscribers when somebody clicks…but all of that is vanity.
You want people on your list that read your work. There is no real value in keeping people who never open, or who have never opened.
If you’re just building from the Substack Network, you can get away with never culling your list, but when you start integrating other things, that is when you’ll start to need to think about it.
If you’re curious, you can go to DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>SUBSCRIBERS and then these are the filters I used.
SUBSCRIPTION TYPE is COMP
SUBSCRIPTION SOURCE (FREE) is IMPORT
EMAIL OPENS (ALL TIME) is less than or equal to 1
LINK CLICKS is less than or equal to 1
COMMENTS is less than or equal to 1
ACTIVITY is ZERO STARS
SUBSCRIPTION DATE is before 5/19/23
SUBSCRIPTION DATE is after 4/27/23
Those last two were the dates between which I uploaded and comped 25,000 people.
That’s a lot, but I’m pretty excited that 17,000 of those people did engage. It was absolutely worth it to run this experiment and I will do it again.
More importantly, I couldn’t watch my open rate be artificially deflated by that much.
That’s 28% of my list that I knew would never engage, which means hopefully my next email will have a 40-50% open rate like it did before I added this last group of people.
Which is the last thing I will say, all of these “dead” emails came from a group of 9,000 people who I imported last. Before then all the emails were still getting a huge open rate.
