Why I deleted 15,000 subscribers from my email list

Last year (2021) I deleted 15,000 subscribers off my email list. I watched my email list go from close to 80,000, back down to 60,000. And since then I've gone through a couple more deletes where I've removed anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 contacts at a time. And each time it hurts so much, but it had to be done. And today, I'm sharing exactly why I did it and the signs that I knew I had to go through and clean out my email list a little bit.

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Why you should clean out your email list

So having these extra subscribers on my email list was really just keeping my ego happy. It was just a vanity metric that made me feel successful because none of these subscribers were the right people for my business. They didn't open my emails, they didn't click, and none of them bought anything that I was selling. They literally were having no impact on my business, except I was having to spend more for a higher plan in my email marketing software because I had over 70,000 contacts.

 

Now, here were a couple of the reasons why I deleted these subscribers.

 

So firstly, a lot of them came from a free masterclass that I was running Facebook ads to. And it was great. It was for my podcasting masterclass. But what happened is that podcasting masterclass really took off and I ended up having around a hundred thousand people go through it in the space of about 18 months. Now, a lot of those leads were really average leads. Some of them were misspelled email addresses. Some of them were junk email addresses. Some of them were just interested in my podcasting masterclass, but had no interest in any of the other things that my business did. Many of them didn't even have businesses. They just wanted to start a podcast about a hobby or a storytelling podcast, for example.

 

So I knew that these people weren't the right people because they weren't opening my emails and they weren't clicking my emails and my open rates and my clickthrough rates decreased big time. So I chose to delete them because I know that it's expensive to pay for the higher plan in my email marketing tool. And why should I pay money to keep subscribers there when they're not opening my emails, not clicking them and not buying from me? I would rather have a small audience of people who want to hear from me, who want to buy from me, who want to click on my emails, than a large audience of people who are just sitting there and not engaging with anything that I'm sending them.

 

And I also only want people who are genuinely interested in what I do. I'm not in the business of convincing people to buy from me. I'm not trying to sell to people who don't want what I'm selling to them. And it's really funny because I thought that deleting these contacts would actually have a bit of an impact on my business, but it's literally had no impact. My open rates have gone up because there's fewer people on the email list. So a greater percentage are opening them. My clickthrough rates have gone up and I spend less on my email marketing software now. So every couple of months now I jump in and I delete a bunch of contacts who haven't interacted, who haven't opened any emails in a while, who haven't clicked on anything. And the first few times I did that, it felt really painful, but now it almost feels like I'm just chopping off the deadwood. I'm pruning to create energetic space for the right people to come into my email list.

 

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