Should I remove unengaged subscribers from my newsletter list?

One of my newsletters had about 12,000 subscribers. A deliverability expert went through it and told me roughly 3,900 hadn't engaged in the last 90 days. That's about a third of the list doing nothing.

My answer on this has changed. For a while I argued against purging. Now my team removes people who never open, and I want a warning email to go out first.

Why would you delete subscribers you paid for?

Because they're costing you the subscribers who do read. Open and engagement rates matter more and more to Google. If it sees low engagement from a lot of your recipients, it hides more of your email in promotions or even spam.

"If you delete those people... That drops me to eight, which is still a good number, so I might actually do that."

Eight thousand engaged readers in the primary inbox beats 12,000 where a third of them are dragging you into promotions or spam.

Why was I against purging at first?

• Open rates aren't accurate. Mostly because of Apple's mail privacy, but really in general. Newsletter people will tell you this.
• You can cut real readers. I've heard publishers tell the story: they purged everyone who hadn't opened in three months, then got emails asking what happened to the newsletter they read every week.
• Advertisers don't ask. I'd talked to about ten advertisers. None of them asked about our open rate. Local business owners mostly don't know what it is, and they don't care whether it's 55% or 65%. They know how many people are on your list.
• It's data. Someone at a newsletter conference I went to asked why you'd ever delete people, because that's valuable data.

As my lists grew, open rates slipped from about 60% to about 56%, which I think is fairly standard. The usual advice is to run a removal sequence and get back to 60% or 65%. I didn't, because a bigger list with a lower open rate felt like a better pitch for a local business that isn't sophisticated. My target was 10,000 subscribers, which I've called the best number to get to.

What changed my mind?

Engagement started affecting the brands themselves. Earlier I figured local advertisers don't know what open rate means, so who cares if it's lower. But if open and engagement rates get too low, your actual readers may stop seeing the newsletter, and that's worse than a smaller number.

The moment it got urgent was the first issue of a senior-focused newsletter of ours, which came in with a low open rate. I gave the team two weeks to go into every single brand and come up with a plan for removing people who don't open, because I thought it was hurting us a lot.

That brand also showed me the other side of the size argument. For an audience that engaged, I'd take a smaller list where everyone who wants to see us actually sees us, instead of mail going to spam.

Who exactly should you remove?

The guaranteed dead weight. We removed people who never opened anything. A lot of people open only sometimes, and we obviously keep them.

"We got rid of the guaranteed dead weight, not people who sometimes engage, sometimes don't."

A teammate set up an automation that drops anyone with no opens in the last 65 days. The deliverability review on my 12,000-person list used 90 days. There are two levels to this:

• Send mainly to recent openers when a list's open rate falls to about 30% to 33%. Fast and reversible. More in what to do when your open rate drops to about 30%.
• Remove the never-openers when a big inactive block is hurting inbox placement.

How do you warn them before removing them?

Before you delete anyone, set up an automation that tries to win them back. The inactive group already exists as a segment, so you aren't building anything new. You're just emailing it.

You signed up for [newsletter name], and we're so excited to have you.
We noticed you haven't opened in a while.
If you still want this newsletter, click here.
If not, we'll remove you.

We've only run that simple version so far. I'd test it in one or two newsletters first, see what happens, and then copy it to the rest.

What causes a big inactive block?

• Gaps in sending. A brand that ran ads for eight weeks before its first real issue started 10 to 15 points behind on opens.
• Very cheap, fast growth. Part of why subscribers get so cheap is that Facebook gets excited and shows your ad to everybody, and not everybody is your ideal reader. My cheapest-to-acquire list is also my only weak opener at 28% to 30%. I don't claim one causes the other. A 40% open rate before you've sent a real issue is probably good to average.
• Scale. At a certain size, if you're not doing things correctly, the whole thing can blow up.

Other operators see it too. Alex, a guest on my podcast who runs Mount Juliet Buzz, deleted a couple hundred people who never opened and landed at 3,410 subscribers. His open rate later fell from about 72% to 65% after he added sign-ups from a local Facebook group.

Cleaning won't stall growth as long as you keep acquiring. Lists shrink on their own as people unsubscribe and fall off. Another podcast guest paused ads for a few months to focus on sponsorships and watched the list slide toward under 10,000. Keep a floor of acquisition running while you clean.

What should you report as your subscriber count?

Active subscribers. I've had over 200,000 subscribers in total across my brands, and I've cut inactive ones along the way. When I put a number on a website, I use active subscribers as the defined metric, because that's the honest claim.