Email List Cleanup

Your email list can look “big” and still be weak where it counts. We walk through a behind-the-scenes shift we made as our ideal audience got more niche, our opt-ins got tighter, and the time it takes a subscriber to become a buyer got shorter. That change forces a new question: who is actually reading, clicking, and moving toward a purchase, and who is just sitting there as a number on a dashboard?

We dig into a simple framework for email list cleaning and subscriber engagement, including our three-month cutoff for people who have not opened an email. We also explain how to identify cold subscribers inside Kit, when it makes sense to give someone a little grace, and why removing inactive contacts can raise your open rate and click-through rate. If you care about email deliverability, conversions, and building a real customer journey, this is the kind of “unsexy” maintenance that can make your marketing work harder.

We also zoom out to the strategic side: seasonality, one-time buyers, and what happens when your business solves a problem so well that customers do not come back. The goal is not to keep everyone forever, it is to know your audience, understand your sales cycle, and build a list that supports your products and services instead of dragging them down. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a business friend, and leave a review telling us your rule for when a subscriber goes cold.

Transcript

Why List Cleaning Matters

Jenny 0:00

Over the years, I've had various conversations with different clients about the idea of cleaning your list. What should that look like? Why would you want to do it? So, what I wanted to do is share a little bit of the behind the scenes with my business. So, as many of you know, my ideal audience has gotten very niche specific. I have made sure that I'm zoning in on them. I'm making sure that my opt-ins are it meant for them. They're in line with where they are trying to go. Now, because of this, in the past, I used to say about my list that people would sit on my list for anywhere from one to three years before they would actually purchase something. They would need to have a lot of education, they would need to be building their business. So learning from the episodes that I was providing on the podcast. And then it would take them some time to actually start to make a decent amount of money where they felt like comfortable being able to purchase a product or service with me. Now, when at that time, I was primarily looking to attract bloggers. That's what I had been. That's what I thought I understood. And then as I started to shift with seeing that chasing page views was not an option and making money solely from ads, and really started to focus on the fact that you need a product or service, you have to be growing an email list. And a lot of my bloggers weren't willing to make that leap. Now, there's some of you listening to this unhinged episode and going, um, I was one of those. I've been there from the beginning. And that's the difference. You were willing to make the leap. You are willing to see the writing on the wall with me and create those products and services that are going to make you that business owner that isn't relying solely on ad income, sponsorships, affiliates. You've diversified and you've diversified in a way that made yourself a business. So you are someone that I wanted to take along with me. And when I talk about this, the reason that I bring up the fact that the bloggers and the shifting of the niche is that now what I am seeing is people do not need to sit on my list for a year. If they haven't opened an email in three months, they don't need to be there. They are not the right fit, they're not willing to take the leap, they're not willing to invest in themselves, which is totally fine. And they're just not at that point within their business. If they have not opened an email, though, from me within three months, I clean them. I recently did it, I deleted more than 3,000 emails and they were cold. Now, depending upon who your email service provider is, you should be able to tell if you have cold subscribers. If you're with Kit, it's a simple toggle. When you're on your subscriber list, you have the option to actually toggle to cold subscribers. And that's exactly what I did. I checked to see how long they had been there, just making sure that all of the information was correct, that they were cold. There were some on there that I felt were underneath that three months where I feel three months is too much of a window. So I might have kept them if they were hadn't opened and they were labeled cold because they hadn't opened in like a month. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. So I my window for that is three months. So based on what Kit was giving me, I was able to delete bulk delete a bunch of them, but also kept some of the ones that I was curious about because it had been a month and initially they had been opening emails for a while. And I just want to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe something happened and they've just been a little sideways with what they're doing right now in their business. But once those people are deleted, my list becomes that much stronger because my open rate improves, because my click rate improves, because now it's the people that were opening, which is the purpose of having an email list. You have to remember that your numbers can often be vanity metrics. If they're not opening and they're not clicking, it's a vanity metric. It's not something that's actually impacting and making a conversion within your business. It's the same thing with impressions. If there are no conversions, that doesn't make a difference how many people are seeing it because it's obviously not to have them take any action if it's not converting. So it's important that when you look at this to kind of determine where you are in your business. Now, for some of you listening, you might have a business that's more seasonal, or you may have something where they come once and they're never going to, if they buy something from you, maybe they're not going to come back because you've solved the problem that they have because of your service. And that's fine. You just need to determine what kind of audience you have. Do you have something else for them if they have already purchased something? Is there a next level they can potentially go to? Is there something else you could help them with? If not, do not be afraid to get rid of those people that have become cold. And you have to know what the seasonality of your list is. If someone needs to be on your list for a year before they're going to purchase, that's okay. Sometimes people need to have a longer customer journey in order to actually convert to liking, trusting, and then buying from you. So I want you to be sure that you take a look at your business, determine what is the right fit, and don't be afraid to delete those cold subscribers. It's just dead weight if you keep them.