If you have been building your list for any period of time it is a good bet that you will have a varied group of people on your subscriber list.
It is likely that they could fit into the following categories:
- super fans – open all or almost all of your emails, click on links and take the action you want them to take
- fans – open most of your emails and click on your links more often than not
- lukewarm subscribers – open some of your emails and click your links sometimes
- cold subscribers – open the occasional email but rarely, if ever, click anything
- dead subscribers – no activity at all.
Don’t think twice about removing inactive people from your subscriber list, rather like you would remove dead leaves from a plant.
The cold subscribers are good candidates for pruning too – especially if they used to open your emails in the past but have stopped doing so for a few months or so.
The benefits of this include:
- you are no longer sending emails to people who don’t want to hear from you any more
- you reduce the likelihood of getting spam complaints from people who are on your list but had forgotten they had signed up
- your overall open rates will increase as you will have a smaller but more responsive list.
- if you have a very large list it could end up saving you money in reduced fees.