Growing a Business
Time to Clean Your Email List? Why We Deleted 40% of Our Subscribers
Late last year, we decided to delete 40 percent of our email subscribers. That’s approximately 90,000 people who’ll probably never get an email from us again. Why on earth did we do this? Today, I’ll share the four key reasons—they might help you decide if cleaning your email list makes sense for you and your business.
It’s Cold Out There (If You’re Not Reading Our Emails)
When I talk about deleting 40 percent of our email list, I don’t just mean a random 40 percent. This was a targeted trimming—we were focused on a set of subscribers we call our cold subscribers.
🥶 + 📧 = 👎
These were the people who hadn’t taken any action on our emails in a while. How long? In our case, we’ll refer to the dashboard of the email list management tool we use, ConvertKit.
ConvertKit uses a star rating system to score each person on your list. Here’s a breakdown of that scoring system:
- ⭐️ = Subscribers who have not engaged with your content in the past 9 months.
- ⭐️⭐️ = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 9 months.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 6 months.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 90 days.
- ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ = Subscribers who have engaged with your content in the past 30 days, or purchased one of your products.
Five-star subscribers are great, while one-star subscribers are not great.
You can see how our email audience broke down across these five categories in this screenshot of our ConvertKit dashboard.
We had a lot of highly engaged subscribers—that’s great! But also a lot of unengaged ones.
And so we decided to prune out the one-star subscribers, the ones who aren’t reading emails or taking action on our content.
Now, sometimes your email service provider’s indication of whether someone is active or not can be inaccurate. We’ll get to that toward the end of this post.
But first…
The Four Reasons We Decided to Clean Our Email List
Let’s talk about the four main reasons we decided to prune cold subscribers from our email list, and why you might want to too.
#1: They were costing us money
First of all, we are paying for every subscriber on our list. That means the more subscribers we have, the more it’s costing us.
If we have a lot of subscribers sitting on our email list but not taking any action, essentially we’re paying for them to not read our emails!
To be honest, that just doesn’t sound like a great use of our money. So if these subscribers aren’t going to read our emails anyway, let’s not include them on our list any longer.
#2: They were decreasing our open rates
Another reason we might want to prune our subscribers is that inactive list members are decreasing our email open rates.
Your open rate gives you a general sense of how many people are engaging with your email content.
What’s a good email open rate? It depends. The range across industries tends to be between 15 and 30 percent, and the average is usually around 20 percent. And what’s a good open rate for you depends, not surprisingly, on your business and your unique goals.
Let’s go back to that dashboard and look at SPI’s open rates before we cleaned our email list.
The average open rate across all of our emails was a little less than 18 percent.
Again, this may or may not represent a low open rate for you and your business—but for us, it told us that we could be doing better.
Now there are a lot of factors that can affect your email open rate. And there are things that can make your open rate misleading. But as a rough measure of the health of our email list, 18 percent was a little lower than we wanted it to be.
#3: They were hurting our sending reputation
The third reason we care about cold subscribers and whether or not people are actually reading our emails is because they affect our sending reputation. Say what?
Sending reputation (or sender reputation) is a broad term for how email clients like Gmail judge us as a trustworthy email-sending entity (or not).
When an email comes in from our domain, is the receiver’s email client going to flag it as spam, or send it to the top of the inbox? Does it think the email is something the subscriber wants to read? Or is it going to shuttle it into the Promotions tab?
The more of our emails that get sent right to the inbox, the more they’ll get read. This will improve our sending reputation, which means that future emails are also more likely to make it to the inbox. It’s a positive feedback loop we want to feed.
But if emails are getting ignored, unsubscribed from, or marked as spam, then our sending reputation is going to suffer.
That’s another reason we want people on our email list to actually, you know, want to read our emails—and not let them flounder in their inbox, or worse, click unsubscribe or flag them as junk.
Sending reputation is a bit of a complicated situation, so check out ConvertKit’s Deliverability Defined podcast for more information for a deeper study of your sending authority and what that all means.
#4: They were (probably) not interested in hearing from us
The fourth reason—and it’s an important one—is that we don’t want to bother people who aren’t interested in getting our emails.
In SPI’s case, if somebody was interested in our content nine months ago, but then decided not to start an online business, we don’t want to keep bugging them. There’s no reason to keep sending emails that are just going to stack up in their inbox.
So we can do them (and us) a kindness and unsubscribe them.
Are They Actually Cold Subscribers? It’s Worth Checking
So those are the four reasons we decided to prune out the cold subscribers from the SPI email list—and why you might want to do the same.
But before you go ahead and remove a bunch of people from your list, there’s one more important step you should consider. It gets to the question of whether or not those “cold” subscribers are actually cold.
You see, for any given subscriber, that designation might or might not be accurate. Your email service provider can’t always determine without a shadow of a doubt that an email has been read, for instance. Email is complicated!
That’s why it can be worth it to check with your subscribers first before booting them from your list. You can do this with a reengagement campaign—a series of emails that gives subscribers a chance to verify if they actually want to stick around before you give them the boot.
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The idea for sharing community management tips came to me about a year ago. That’s when I synced up with the GoDaddy Community team to host a webinar for small business owners. As hundreds of attendees rolled into the Zoom, I had a realization: “GoDaddy has a strong community.”
Behind every good brand and business, there’s a solid community of supporters, stakeholders, and sometimes, even haters.
But building a community and maintaining connections is one of the most misunderstood and least talked about topics within the small business world. For a business with fewer than five employees and a handful of customers, community building might seem like just another marketing tactic that is just out of reach.
To help small businesses build and manage an online community, I asked other business owners and marketers what community management tips they had for creating meaningful connections with customers.
14 community management tips to create meaningful customer connections
Given that creating and maintaining a strong community can help retain and attract customers, consider following these 14 community management tips:
- Be quick to address negative experiences
- Filter out spam
- Showcase success
- Send a postcard
- Get your customers involved in important decisions
- Bring Up topics that encourage engagement
- Provide talking points and engage with your community
- Engage regularly
- Be the face of your brand
- Choose a channel that works
- Create content that addresses customers’ specific needs
- Consider a brand ambassador program
- Reward loyalty
- Recognize the importance of inclusivity
Read on to learn more.
1. Be quick to address negative experiences
A bad customer experience can quickly escalate to a brand reputation crisis, and the company’s response must be fast to revert the situation.
Monitoring social channel mentions is an easy way to keep an eye on conversations surrounding your brand and detect potential concerns.
Once a customer posts a comment that threatens your brand reputation, listen, honestly apologize and be willing to solve the issue in the best possible way. Your unsatisfied customer will feel appreciated and perhaps even become a brand advocate.
-Rebeca Sena, GetSpace.digital
2. Filter out spam
The most important thing you should be doing in regards to community management is interacting with your community, and you cannot do that properly if you have to work through a bunch of spam. There are many programs out there, even some within the different social media sites, that can filter out spam in your comments and messages so you can focus on addressing your community. Plus, getting rid of the spam and moderating harmful comments creates a better space for your community to contact you through.
-Jacob Dayan, Community Tax
3. Showcase success
Develop case studies from your successful community members. This is a practical way of propagating the core values of your online community and encouraging new users to join your community.
The more these members contribute to the community, the more impact these case studies have. You can start by creating basic reports to identify the members who are actively contributing high-quality content, assisting other members, and elevating the community.
-Hasan Farahani, Yocale
4. Send a postcard
Many of my customers spend $15–$20K on medical care in Latin America. I send my customers handwritten postcards to remind them of their journey, thank them for their business, and to stay engaged while they recover from procedures like dental implants or plastic surgery.
The cost in time and money is very low, but a human touch in the healthcare space is increasingly rare.
-Wesley Jacobs, Apollo Medical Travel
5. Get your customers involved in important decisions
Taking the time to follow up with your most active customers and getting their insights on important decisions makes them feel like their opinions are truly valued and cared for.
In the long run, this forges a strong connection between you and your audience that relies on more than simply a transaction.
An added benefit of doing this is that you may even get some eye-opening suggestions and creative ideas that could end up benefiting your business.
-Harry Morton, Lower Street
6. Bring up topics that encourage engagement
Meaningful connections need to originate from a common source that offers a moment of relatability, which can further build brand trust. Social platforms offer numerous opportunities for these types of exchanges. When managing your social community, bring up topics that encourage engagement so you can connect on a level that goes beyond the basic company/customer relationship. In doing so, the consumer will feel more at ease to comment, ask questions and even provide more detailed feedback.
-Lindsay McCormick, Bite
7. Provide talking points and engage with your community
It’s important to recognize that community management is an ongoing responsibility. If you want to see your community thrive, you must create opportunities for customers to voice their opinion, communicate with other community members and provide you with feedback. Finding success is contingent on your ability to encourage participation from users, so you must provide talking points and give them plenty of avenues to stay involved.
If you leave your community dormant without your administrative oversight, engagement will start to dwindle as fewer users initiate conversations and take part.
Communities rarely function autonomously, so be sure to play an active role as you connect with and safeguard your community.
This gives you a chance to speak with your customers on a personal level, helping you learn about their likes, dislikes, objections and pain points directly—all of which are crucial in building meaningful connections with customers.
-Mike Grossman, GoodHire
8. Engage regularly
The best community management tip is to engage regularly and don’t neglect questions or threads you didn’t start—even better if they aren’t getting a lot of feedback. If you’re lucky enough to have the opportunity to regularly interact with your customers, make sure you’re commenting often and have a badge next to your name letting them know you’re a moderator or part of the company. That will really cement that feeling of connection and letting members feel heard. Plus, we’ve found that a community manager can really breathe life into a topic by offering input and pushing it to the front of that community for more engagement.
-Sylvia Kang, Mira
9. Be the face of your brand
Revealing the human side of your brand is without a shadow of a doubt an efficient strategy to boost your customers’ connection. It conveys transparency and accountability, building a stronger human bond. Consumers tend to trust people more than a company, and showcasing real people will make you and your brand easier to remember and trust.
-Chiara Sternardi, Passport-photo.online
10. Choose a channel that works
The best way to build an authentic community is to have everyone communicate using the same social media platform. Make that a crucial part of your strategy.
If it’s a professional audience that you’re going after, choose LinkedIn. If it’s a broader audience, use Facebook or Instagram. If it’s a young audience, try Snapchat or WhatsApp. If it’s a politically charged audience, maybe try Twitter.
YouTube is a great way to encourage people to watch videos that provide clear instructions on how a product or service works.
Users flock to YouTube for instructions on everything from how to change batteries on a device to playing scales on a guitar. The comment section can be useful for feedback purposes, and it also can be a way for customers to communicate with one another.
-Joel Jackson, Lifeforce
11. Create content that addresses customers’ specific needs
By creating audience and buyer personas based on different client categories, content marketers can create social content that speaks to people rather than just industries. Learn where your customers hang out online using your social media demographics. Then, narrow those results using audience research to help you define a specific audience and channel. You can then customize communications by researching the LinkedIn profiles of potential customers. Doing so will allow you to identify different stakeholders within the organization and determine their pain points. You can then create better content that addresses their challenges. But it’s all about finding an interesting angle for each segment.
Content that is too broad won’t result in authentic engagement with your followers.
Social media posts that offer helpful information are guaranteed to stand out in your clients’ feeds, resulting in more likes, shares and leads.
-Daniel Tejada, Straight Up Growth
12. Consider a brand ambassador program
A great way to create authentic connections with customers is with an acquisition and advocacy program like a brand ambassador program. For example, if a user can get five people to sign up for a service or product, they become an ambassador.
These brand ambassadors can help your business acquire new users. You can reward them with swag and access to special products or services … maybe even a special event!
-Jennifer Pieniazek, Resume Now
13. Reward loyalty
You can create meaningful connections by rewarding loyal customers to show how much you appreciate them. Just like any relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, people appreciate rewards. Show your customers that they matter and are top of mind in your decision-making. That’s how you create a stronger, more loyal customer base—one that will continue to pay attention for new initiatives and future rewards.
-Alyssa Berman-Waugh, Level Home, Inc.
14. Recognize the importance of inclusivity
To create meaningful connections with customers, recognize and accept diversities within your community. Each of your customers will differ in terms of their culture, orientation, ability and life experience. It’s imperative that you celebrate these differences and welcome input from individuals of all walks of life as you advocate for equity and inclusivity. This will develop your community’s reputation and attract diverse groups in greater numbers.
Communities that cater to just one group of people almost always become echo chambers, creating a suboptimal environment for connections to form and important discussions to take place.
By listening, asking questions, and welcoming input from diverse groups of individuals, you’ll cement your community as a welcoming place for diversity and insight to flourish.
In doing so, your ability to build a rapport and create meaningful, lasting connections with your customers will blossom.
-Patrick Casey, Felix
The community management tips used in this article were gathered using Terkel.
Terkel creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.
Have you ever made a dining decision based on a review you saw on the internet? You may have picked a product because it seemed “more trustworthy” online. It’s also a deal breaker if it isn’t handled correctly.
Customers are more inclined to believe in your company if it presents itself well on the internet. Whether a startup or a large corporation, your online appearance and behaviour matter to your consumers if you own an offline or online company.
Why Should Your Business Go Online?
In addition to being available for your consumers, here are other reasons to consider your online presence.
It Improves Your Company’s Accessibility
When you don’t sell anything online, a solid online presence can help you make more money from the internet if you aren’t engaged on social media.
Before making a purchase, most consumers do internet research to learn more about the company and the goods. Being at the right place at the right time is simply good business.
It Takes Care of Your Marketing and Branding
An internet presence provides a steady supply of customers for your company. Customer feedback and social media participation may help boost purchases. It’s easier for consumers to identify your online presence with a website or social media account.
It May Boosts Your Company’s Credibility
Having an online presence is essential for your organisation to be taken seriously. A startup might have difficulty being accepted as a legitimate organisation in its early stages. It’s essential to have a strong internet presence before people take you seriously. It’s easier to get quick loans at gdayloans.com.au to expand your company.
It Aids in the Comprehension of Your Target Market
When you have an online presence, you can engage with your audience in a two-way conversation to get valuable feedback or evaluations. In addition, it helps you learn more about your prospective consumers and the things they’re looking for. If a restaurant uses polls on its Facebook page, it may determine which specials and goods are most popular with its patrons.
How Can You Evaluate and Enhance Your Company’s Web Presence?
Analysing your online reputation simply means monitoring what others say about you online. Then you make it work for you.
You can monitor and enhance your company’s online appearance by following these three steps.:
Monitor Mentions of Your Business
Monitoring your company’s internet mentions can help you track what’s being said about you and mitigate unfavourable publicity. This can also help you identify communication gaps.
Google Alerts can help you track online references of your company. Set up notifications for your business/product name and relevant keywords, and you’ll be alerted promptly whenever you’re mentioned anyplace online.
Analyse Your Website Traffic
The source of your traffic (and how much) might assist you in evaluating your internet presence. It may be necessary to expand your internet activities beyond your website. For example, low social media traffic might imply a poor social presence.
Tracking your website’s traffic with Google Analytics might reveal secret traffic sources that your Google search may have overlooked. It will also help you find unnoticed remarks or backlinks.
Assess Your Social Media Engagement
Your social media presence affects your online reputation as well. Active consumers on your social media platforms help build trust and confidence.
Consider checking a company’s and a competitor’s Facebook accounts. You may observe that one firm interacts with clients while the other has a few likes but no comments. Which do you prefer?
Bottom Line
An active social media presence gives the impression of reliability while also conveying a sense of humanity and authenticity. Your audience will be more engaged as your social media presence improves.
To keep up with your target audience, you need to be one step ahead of them online. The first step is to become well-versed in everything your consumers discover about your company through the internet. Your internet presence must be understood, monitored, and improved to reach this goal.
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