email-lists-smaller-better

Have you been attracted to headlines like these?

  • 50 Tips to Help You Get 50,000 Email Subscribers for Your List
  • 20 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Get More Email Subscribers
  • How to Build an Email Marketing List as Quickly as Possible
  • 10 Irresistible Incentives That Will Grow Your Email List—Fast

Of course you have, and I understand why: For us content marketers, eyeballs are everything. The more people we have reading, listening to, and watching our content, the better.

But what if the best way to grow a loyal audience for your content is to let your subscribers go, or even to shove them out the door? I learned the hard way that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to email lists. Now, I want to share how to pare your list to make it more effective for your business – and your target audience.

Let’s begin.

Backstory

I’m the co-publisher of Renegade Writer Press. We’ve published books for years, but only started getting serious about the business this year.

When my business partner, Diana Burrell, and I sat down to talk numbers, we had over 7,000 subscribers on our MailChimp mailing list, but our open rate was only 20 to 25%, which was much lower than the 32% average open rate across industries. Our click-through rate was a piddling 2 to 4.5%.

I had just talked with another professional in our industry who said she racked up an over 50% open rate. How did she do it? She only kept people on her list who wanted to be there.

My business partner and I quickly created and downloaded a segment of subscribers who hadn’t opened any of our emails in the past couple of months, and then unsubscribed those members. We then wrote an email to those inactive subscribers letting them know that in the interest of not cluttering their inboxes, we had unsubscribed them from our mailing list. (We sent this email via our business Gmail account.) Finally, we provided a link where those readers could quickly re-subscribe if they wanted.

Your-Subscription-Has-Expired-Email

Our email list dropped from more than 7,000 subscribers to around 1,200 – and our open rate jumped from between 20 and 25% to between 55 and 60%. The click-through rate on our last newsletter was 7.1%.

Did we lose some people who didn’t want to unsubscribe? Probably, because MailChimp’s reporting isn’t perfect. If those subscribers really wanted to be there, they would notice the missing emails and re-subscribe. That’s how hardcore we were about only wanting subscribers who want to read our content.

Even better, our book sales have been increasing steadily since we kicked off subscribers who were less than passionate about our content and our products. We’ve made other changes to our business that may account for the increase in sales, but the point is that our sales did not decline.

Why smaller is better

Keeping people on your list who truly don’t want to read your content or buy from you hurts your business in several ways, including:

  • Having a load of subscribers who aren’t really interested in your content and offerings skews your analyses. When you survey your subscribers, the replies are not necessarily from people interested in ever buying from you.
  • Creating content for a diverse and numerous audience weakens your success because you’re writing for a lot of people who just don’t care.
  • Paying for inactive subscribers is an unnecessary cost. When we reduced our list to 1,200 dedicated readers, we saved the $75 per month we were paying for hosting of a list of 7,000-plus unengaged subscribers.

Are you convinced that bigger isn’t always better, and that not all subscribers are equal? Good. Then you’re ready for the five ways to encourage – directly and indirectly – your less-enthused subscribers to leave.

1. Create content for the people who love you

If you aren’t worried about retaining every last one of your subscribers, you can better understand who your…