Why I Deleted Half My Email List

The truth is true. Thursday afternoon, as gray clouds wafted across my office window, I sat down at my desk, logged into the little word studio Mailchimp account and deleted almost half of our entire email list.

Whoops?!

I have a pretty awesome email list I’ve built over the years - mostly clients, friends, family and people who have seen me speak or attended one of my virtual classes. And in the spirit of transparency, open rates hover around 57%, which is a healthy number for any campaign.

But earlier that day, I received an email about an unsubscribe to my email newsletter, the Weekly Wrap. Curious to see why this person abandoned my inbox party, I clicked. The response submitted via Mailchimp: spammy content.

Uuuuuuggggh. I would’ve been cool with a “no longer interested” or even a “changed my mind” but spammy content? That felt like a punch in the gut.

So, I took a deep breath, allowing my big business-y wheel to keep on turning, then came to one burning conclusion: Take your own advice. Let them go.

In my last Little Reminder, I wrote about a “let them” strategy of content creation, where you basically unburden yourself from the expectations of others. Knowing you can’t control their thoughts or actions (and shouldn’t want to), you simply let things unfold as they will and focus instead on your own journey.

But I didn’t stop at this email epiphany.

Because if a “let them” strategy means leading with only the intrinsic value you believe you provide, then anyone who doesn’t get it, shouldn’t have to. Translation: Go through my email list, figure out who hasn’t opened this newsletter in the last two(ish) months, and archive those contacts so they don’t get new editions going forward. It’s like removing the onions from a pizza before Customer-who-doesn’t-like-onions arrives at the restaurant and orders a slice. Is it an insult to the chef that Customer-who-doesn’t-like-onions … doesn’t like onions? No. It just means that’s not their flavor, and it probably never will be. Call it spammy, call it onion-y, but if what you’re doing isn’t appetizing for some, focus on the people who really dig what you dish.

The archive exercise was also interesting from a data-driven perspective. I found that the same people continued to open the email week after week, and the same people continued to not open the email week after week. Aha! A pattern! I was on the right track.

When I deleted contacts who didn’t interact with the weekly newsletter, the list was distilled down to the recipients who continue to take something actionable or valuable away from my messages. My email newsletter crowd is now filled with digital friends who will appreciate, refer, interact, engage … all the good thing you want a receptive audience to do. It’s the same reason some brands and businesses are starting to utilize the close friends list feature on Instagram to send targeted content to a select group of highly engaged followers. It's also why a lot of organizations prefer an opt-in vs. opt-out tactic for their marketing campaigns.

Anyway, what do you think? I’d love your take: Would this type of strategy work for you? Putting on my strategic consultant hat, I don’t think it’s for every type of business but a strong consideration for small businesses, especially small service-based businesses like mine.

P.S. and an anticlimactic, technical side note: You don’t have to manually delete or archive contacts to achieve a distilled-down list. Depending on the email distribution platform you use, you can filter by those who opened your email over a [X period of time] and create a new segment or tag within your larger list, then only send to that audience going forward.

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