Save money and market more effectively by deleting inactive email subscribers
If you’ve been using email marketing for your business, you know that your number of email subscribers is an important metric for tracking your customer relationships—and according to many marketing experts, it’s the most important metric. The more people opt in to hear from you, the more opportunities you have to stay in front of those individuals to share your message—and hopefully make more sales.
Today’s marketing exercise is, in some respects, a little painful. What I’m talking about is “scrubbing” your email list—deleting the inactive subscribers in your account.
On the surface, this sounds like a terrible idea (at least, it does to me). Why would I want to have 679 subscribers when I currently have 982? The bigger number of subscribers just feels better. It honestly hurts a little to think of just wiping a bunch of opt-ins out of my orbit.
But upon further reflection, I think you’ll find, like me, that you’ll be better off after “scrubbing”, or purging, your list.
Here are some reasons to face the pain and delete inactive users:
- They’re just not that into you: Inactive users are statistically proving how uninterested they are—if they haven’t opened your last 10 emails, it means they get way too many emails to pay attention to, or they aren’t making your emails a priority.
- Save money: Carrying all those extra users is adding to your total number of contacts—and if you ditch that dead weight, you might find yourself in a lower price bracket with your email marketing platform.
- Get more realistic reports: Campaign reports are a handy tool to learn in real time how people respond to your messages. Over the last six months I’ve seen my own open rate creep downward. I suddenly realized—with all these inactive subscribers in my account, that number was no longer accurate. Now that I’ve scrubbed my list of the people who never opened my emails anyway, the number will be higher—and more true to life. I’ll also be able to see with more precision which messages perform comparably better.
How to delete inactive subscribers
To delete inactive subscribers in MailChimp, go to your list, create a new segment, and customize the segment conditions to include the users that are inactive. Here’s a screenshot of how I did that:
Once you have that segment, you can select the users and either unsubscribe or delete them. For more detailed instructions on clearing inactive users and segmenting your list, check out this post on MailChimp’s website.
Not using email marketing yet? Click here to create an account with MailChimp, which is free for your first 2,000 subscribers.
Winona area readers: If you liked this post, don’t miss my Email Marketing 101 class on March 17! Details are here. It’s on St. Patty’s Day, so I may or may not be bringing mint chocolate chip cookies for the class….