How I lost half my readers in 48 hours

I cut my mailing list in half last week, partly by mistake. Here’s how and why.

For the last five weeks I’ve been in Thailand, where my father lives, because he had a series of strokes. It’s been a difficult time for my family, and it was hard for me to come home to Australia.

I didn’t have much time to work when I was in Thailand, which was fine because I didn’t have much mental energy either. Back in Sydney I found I was still too drained to do much, so I decided on some light mailing list admin. Except it turned out I wasn’t really up to that, as those of you who subscribe to my mailing list found out.

I made what might seem like a huge mistake.

Why trim a mailing list?

I said goodbye to half my readers, but I didn’t mean to.

We’ve all signed up for newsletters and lost interest. Perhaps we wanted the free book or the course discount, or we were certain we were going to become mad keen quilters but life didn’t work out that way. Or maybe the guy writing the newsletter lost what you thought he had.

If you’re like many people, you don’t unsubscribe at that point: you just delete the emails from your inbox unopened. That’s:

a chore for you, and
bad for the guy running the mailing list

Some maths. (Stay with me.)

Some simple maths follows. The gist is that people who’ve completely lost interest in your newsletter make it harder to see how you’re doing.

When things are going well 80% or more of my subscribers open my emails. That’s called the open rate.

The open rate is important because it gives you a sense of how you’re doing. If fewer people open your emails, maybe you need to work on your relevance, your writing, or making your headlines enticing.

After a while, however, my true open rate will be distorted by subscribers who have no interest in reading anything I write, however relevant, well-written, or enticingly titled. That’s true of any list.

Percentages matter, even when the actual numbers are the same

Let’s say I have 1,000 subscribers. Now let’s say 300 people, a third of the list, have permanently lost interest for whatever reason.

If 80% of the 700 remaining subscribers open an email, that’s 560 readers.

But my open rate won’t be 80%, my open rate will be just 56%. That’s because I still have 1,000 people on my list, even thought 300 are unlikely ever to open an email from me again.

80% of 700 subscribers and 56% of 1,000 subscribers both add up to 560 readers, but you’ve got a better chance of measuring how you’re doing if you’re looking at subscribers who are at least potentially still interested.

So you contact the uninterested

Every so often I email people who haven’t opened an email from me in three months to ask them if they’d like to stay subscribed. If they haven’t clicked the “yes” link within a couple of days, I remove them from the list. Normally that’s almost all of them.

This is just good list management, so it’s common practice. It’s better for the list owner and, frankly, I don’t like the idea of sending out emails to people who are thinking, “Why is this guy spamming me?”

My mistake this time

This mailing list trim was the task I set myself last week, except I screwed up. Instead of asking only the people who hadn’t opened an email in three months, I sent the question to everyone, even people who had only signed up that day. Doh!

The response

The first email I received was swift and harsh:

That last email just makes you sound a lot like a big bully that’s also so full of himself.

The author told me she’d saved me the trouble of removing her from the list by clicking the unsubscribe link on the email, herself. She wasn’t alone, about 20 others did the same.

I also had some emails from:

people saying they’d hate to be unsubscribed, and
less kind emails from people who were annoyed: why would I be making them jump through this hoop when they generally read my emails?

I was grateful to both groups because feedback is always valuable. And they gave me a chance to explain the mistake. Who knows how many readers I lost who couldn’t understand why I was asking such a redundant question?

The result

Now I had a decision to make. I’d told everyone on the list that they would be unsubscribed if they didn’t click a link. What about those who might have been on holiday? Or don’t open every email but still want to be on the list? Should I honour my promise?

I made the choice to split subscribers into three groups:

Those in the actual target group: people who’d not opened an email in three months. I unsubscribed everyone in this group if they didn’t ask otherwise.
Everyone who opened the email and didn’t click the link to stay subscribed. I figured these people were saying they would like to be unsubscribed, so I did take them off the list.
People who had opened emails in the last three months but didn’t open this one. These people I left on the list. (There’s always an unsubscribe link on emails, so they can do it any time.)

Between the first two groups I lost half my list. I choose to see the positive. I’d expected to lose a third because that’s about how many hadn’t opened an email for months. The others I didn’t mean to lose but they wanted to go, so perhaps not a genuine loss: they would have gone the next time round.

For those of you who remained

Thanks for sticking with me!

Tempted to join now???

If you haven’t joined the mailing list now, at least you know now I’m unlikely to make that mistake again! You can sign up here. (And that still gets you my How to Publish Your Ebook on Amazon’s Kindle course for $16.50, an 85% saving on the public price of $110.)

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