Welcome to the latest installment in my blog post series on newsletters. In previous blog posts we have discussed why you should have one, how to get started setting up a mailing list and newsletter, how to get people to sign up, how to get readers to unsubscribe, and what to put in your newsletter.
If you have been following along at home, you should now have a growing mailing list and should be sending out newsletters on a regular basis, and now is the times to raise the question of maintenance.
To put it another way, how and when should you delete email addresses from your mailing list?
This is a perennially hot topic in marketing circles, and there are as many different opinions as there are grains of sand on a beach. Some say you should run all the email addresses in your mailing list through a validation service, and remove any addresses that raise red flags. Other experts such as David Gaughran say you should cull any email addresses which don’t open your newsletters. And of course everyone agrees you should bring your mailing list in compliance with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
I am of the opinion that you should clean up your mailing list as rarely as possible. In fact, the only time I would recommend removing email addresses en masse from your mailing list is to keep from getting charged more by your mailing list provider (for example, some will charge you more per month if you have more than 1,000; 5,000; or 10,000 subscribers).
The thing is, I prefer to avoid culling my mailing list because I know that any time you cull the list, you will remove active readers by mistake. I’ve actually had readers say this to me after they stopped getting my newsletters, and I have also been culled by mistake. (One well-respected “expert” has cut me from his list twice even though I opened and read all of his newsletters.)
There are many different views on this topic, so I am going to use this post to give you both sides of each argument.
You should use an email validation service
If you read more than a few articles about mailing lists you will likely come across the recommendation that you should use an email validation service such as QEV to confirm that each email address is good. This type of service will confirm that an address has not been blacklisted, still exists at its email server, and belongs to a real person.
Pro: The benefit of using a service like QEV is that it keeps you from adding too many invalid or blacklisted emails to your mailing list. Companies that host mailing lists will disable your account if you add too many questionable email addresses in your mailing list (this happened to a client of mine).
Con: Email validation companies will charge you if you want to verify more than a handful of email addresses, and that validation is only useful in a few specific circumstances. I tested one of these services when I was moving my mailing list in 2018, and I found that the vast majority of the email addresses on my mailing list were good. It turns out that Mailchimp, the company I was using to host my mailing list at the time, had already cleaned my list by removing any email addresses that came back as invalid. This happened each time I sent out a newsletter; I didn’t have to lift a finger.
Conclusion: The only time an email validation service is useful is before you add an email address to your mailing list.
You should periodically delete the email addresses which don’t open your newsletters
One SOP for mailing lists is that, once or twice a year, you should check the stats for your mailing list and remove any email address that never opened one of your newsletters. Most mailing list companies track the open rate for your newsletters, and they can tell you which email addresses opened which newsletters, when the newsletters were opened, etc. You can use that data to decide whether to cull emails from your mailing list.
Pro: Culling email addresses will remove the subscribers who aren’t opening your emails – or so it would seem.
Con: I do not trust the stats collected by mailing list services; thanks to tracking blockers and other privacy tools, you can’t actually tell who opened an email and who did not. I stopped culling email addresses based on open rates after the fifth deleted subscriber told me that they didn’t understand why they stopped getting my emails. They said they read all my emails, and I believe them.
Conclusion: Rather than culling email addresses when they don’t open your newsletters, why not try to get them to engage with your emails? In the industry this is known as a “re-engagement email campaign”, and it involves targeting the those who don’t open your newsletters with emails specifically designed to get a response.
You might ask if they still want to receive your newsletters, but I feel that is passive-aggressive nagging. Instead I think you should give them a positive reason to respond. Offer a free download (you can track who does and doesn’t click the link), or ask them a question about a topic that will interest them, or maybe tell them about a sale on one of your books (again, you can track who clicks the link).
The last time I culled my mailing list was right before I moved to a new mailing list service in early 2021. I wanted to simplify the move, so I sent a freebie to the folks who hadn’t opened a newsletter in six months. (Actually, I sent six.) The vast majority didn’t download that freebie, which told me that it was safe to cut them.
You should cull your mailing list to comply with the GDPR
This EU regulation went into effect several years ago, which would lead some to assume that everyone is in compliance. I on the other hand know from personal experience that it is easy to miss when rules change, or not realize the new rules apply to you, so this recommendation is worth repeating just in case.
The GDPR has many rules on how you can use someone’s information. When it comes to mailing lists, the GDPR requires you to have someone’s permission to use their email address to send them your newsletters. The reason this matters is that it was a common practice to offer someone a free download in exchange for their email, and then add them to your mailing list without actually informing them. (Many companies still do this, but the practice violates the GDPR.)
You need to go through your mailing list and make sure that everyone agreed to get emails from you. If you have to go through one email at a time, do it. When I brought my mailing list into compliance with the GDPR, I identified 24 subscribers that I needed to ask permission to continue sending them emails. Only 9 granted that permission, which was fine.
Pro: The new rules are not just legally required, they are also more ethical. You really shouldn’t be adding people to your mailing list without telling them.
Con: I can’t think of one.
You should cull your mailing list because subscribers cost money
This is the one situation where I think that cleaning up a mailing list is a good idea. A large mailing list with tens of thousands of email addresses can cost you hundreds of dollars each month. If those subscribers are interested in your newsletters, that’s great, but do you really want to keep paying for the subscribers who don’t care about what you have to say?
I hold out hope that an unresponsive subscriber will open the next email, so I am loath to remove them from my mailing list. But I also know that I am paying a company for each email address on my mailing list, and I don’t want to pay any more than I have to.
Pro: This will keep your costs from mushrooming.
Con: You will be losing subscribers, but if you run a re-engagement campaign first, you can keep your losses to a minimum.
Have you culled your mailing list? What is your policy on removing subscribers?
Nancy J. Cohen
Good article. I’ve been using Mailercheck to vet my lists (https://www.mailercheck.com). It’s a tedious process to remove the dead weight one address at a time.