A client of mine (a small skincare brand based in a small studio in Bangalore) contacted me in early 2023. Open rates had dramatically dropped from 34% to 11% over 5 months. Her email service provider (ESP) marked her account for a “sending reputation review”. Nothing seemed to have changed in her email content. She was writing, sending and tracking her emails as she used to. But everything seemed to have changed. The only thing that I could identify was that no one seemed to have touched her list of subscribers for nearly two years.
I have noticed recently that many of the conversations that I have with people who manage lists begin with a description of how they have been sending email for years, and then the emails stopped getting results. The system that used to work so well, has suddenly stopped working.
I know that for many people reading this the real question is “How often to clean my list?” and so I will start by answering that question. For most lists the answer is every 3 to 4 months, but, as I said, that is useless answer without any context. To explain why I would like to first explain where that number came from and then provide some examples of where that number is far from correct.
Lists don’t die evenly
It’s not uniform. It stays the same for long periods of time and then drops precipitously. My experience managing lists for various clients has given me ample evidence of this.
For example, the list of B2B customers who signed up for a product demo that I manage loses around 8-10% of the email addresses that can be used to send emails within a year. It’s slow and mostly due to people changing jobs and their work emails no longer being valid. On the other hand, a retail list of home décor customers that I manage for a client loses around 25% of users who used to open emails within 6 months. The reason for this is that half of the sign-ups for the newsletter were obtained by a “spin the wheel to win 10% off” type of popup and those people never intended to subscribe to the newsletter in the first place.
This also means that the “every quarter” advice above is somewhat inapplicable, because the two lists are so very different. The retail list might even need cleaning on a monthly basis during sales periods. But the B2B list mentioned above could easily go five to six months between cleanups without any problems arising.
What actually happens when you don’t clean
This is also something that most people tend to overlook while attempting to provide advice on list cleaning.
As people stop opening your emails, Gmail and Outlook start to get the message that this sender might not be wanted in this particular inbox. This is usually based on small amounts of data such as individual emails being ignored. The more this happens, the more likely your emails are to end up in the spam folder of your subscribers, including the engaged ones. Recently I helped a wellness newsletter get their open rate of engaged subscribers up from 22% to 40%. All they did was remove the 78% of subscribers who had stopped opening their newsletters in the last 6 months. The reason their open rate had dropped so dramatically was that the sender reputation of the newsletter had taken a hit from the large amount of ignored emails from the same addresses.
There’s the spam trap issue too. When an old email address has fallen out of use, it can get “recycled” by an email provider to catch out lists that haven’t been cleaned. This could be within 3 years of an address last having been opened in your list. If you continue to send to old abandoned addresses on your list, you risk them getting “trapped” as spam and you getting added to a shared black list of “suspect” senders. This happened with the wellness client I was working with recently and it took about 6 weeks and lots of emails with their email provider to get removed from the black list.
The 90-180-365 approach I actually use
I’m not a fan of cleaning lists on specific dates. Instead I look at the subscriber activity (or lack of it) over a certain period of time and then apply the relevant action within a roughly specified timeframe.
The real cleanup happens at the 90 day mark. If the person hasn’t opened anything in the last 90 days, they get moved into a new segment where you can then send them a re-engagement email within 90 days. This email can be as simple as “Still want to hear from us?” and then give them options to re-subscribe.
180 days past the 90-day point: send another email to those folks – a bit more direct in nature, but still be honest and clear. Something like: we’ll stop emailing you unless you tell us otherwise.
And then there’s the matter of people who haven’t opened any of your emails for 365 days. It’s time to bid them good riddance. I mean, remove them from your list. Not delete them in a way that you can’t ever reverse (which is what ‘unsubscribing’ implies), just suppress them from future emails. They’re a risk sitting in your account, and they’re not a future customer that you’re protecting.
When I ran the above process on the skincare brand’s list, her list went from 41,000 contacts to 26,000 but her open rate shot back up to 29% within two cycles of the bill. The really important metric to her was that her monthly bill to run her list went down by almost a third – the bulk of email marketing platforms charging by list size, not by engagement.
** Where the “clean every quarter” advice breaks down**
As a special case to the above advice, a small, highly engaged and intentional newsletter list (like my own) might go 6 months or more between cleanings. My list is small enough (2,000 subscribers or so) and I am writing for a highly engaged and intentional group of readers who chose to subscribe because they specifically wanted my writing and not for some discount or promotion. My list just does not decay that quickly.
On the flip side, frequent promotional emails (think daily or near-daily) for an ecommerce company could warrant checking for engagement on a monthly basis during those times. Because the rate at which people will ignore you rises as quickly as it takes to send more emails, you have to be very aware of how subscribers are engaging with your emails during these times.
Some industries do better than others when it comes to retaining subscribers. Those in media and publishing often have subscribers to their newsletters and/or online magazine because they like to read their content. Therefore, lists in these industries tend to retain their subscribers well over time. Others, such as online retailers, have subscribers who were signed up by their customers to receive special offers. The typical lifecycle of such a subscriber is to receive a discount offer, then to unsubscribe to the list after that offer has been redeemed. This type of subscriber behavior is well outside of the normal reader or ‘engaged’ subscriber that most newsletter writers are used to.
A quick note on what “cleaning” doesn’t mean
Cleaning a list off does not mean deleting everyone who has not purchased in the last X amount of time. This type of action would remove people from your list who are engaged readers, but have never made a purchase. The silent subscriber (who has never made a purchase) is someone that you may choose to remove from your list as well. However, this type of person is removed for different reasons than someone who has never made a purchase but is actively engaged with your emails.
It also does not mean guessing. You can use your email service provider’s existing data to filter out inactive subscribers. For example, in Klaviyo, you can create a list of subscribers who last engaged within a date range that you choose. In Mailchimp, you can create a segment of subscribers who last engaged within a specific time frame. The same is true in ActiveCampaign.
So, how often
Check your engagement segments on a monthly basis. Then wait 90 days or so and act on that list (i.e. send a re-engagement campaign and then remove the unresponsive folks from your list). Note that if you are sending high frequency promotional emails then that time frame will likely be shorter.
I still do a light check every month to see how things are going but do a deeper clean-up every 3 months. All in all it’s about 20 minutes of my time each time and my list of subscribers is smaller than it used to be but my open rates and click throughs are better than ever before. And best of all my monthly platform bill has decreased by almost a third. Not because I found some clever way to do things but because I was ignoring the quiet 60% of my subscribers that had stopped listening a long time ago.
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