Paring down your email list

[jft135]

MailChimp recommends creating a segment of everyone who has not opened any of your last 5 emails and manually unsubscribing them. Before last fall when Technibble started their newsletter service, I hadn't sent an email out for a while. A lot of those addresses are probably pretty stale. Getting rid of them would save me $25/mo on my subscription and increase my open rates, but unsubscribing all those people feels wrong for some reason.

Does anyone actually clean up your list like this?

 

[Y.F.N.C.G.]

I dont like doing that either. I have people on my list who have been dormant for a year and then ended up purchasing something from an email. I would definitely recommend segmenting like they recommend so you can experiment with emails to try to get the dormant people to take action (discounts, specials, etc.)

 

[jft135]

I dont like doing that either. I have people on my list who have been dormant for a year and then ended up purchasing something from an email. I would definitely recommend segmenting like they recommend so you can experiment with emails to try to get the dormant people to take action (discounts, specials, etc.)

Any tips on what you offered in particular? I've thought about doing the opposite and sending the best stuff to my loyal subscribers.

I think part of my problem is that we're in a student town, so a lot of them have probably moved out of the area. I wish they'd unsubscribe on their own. I guess it wouldn't be too hard for me to order another list clean up service to see where everyone's current address is, and then cross reference the list of people out of state with people who never open to get my unsubscribe list.

 

[Bryce W]

I wish they'd unsubscribe on their own.

Pro Tip: Do not TELL them to Unsubscribe, a mass unsubscribe from your emails will affect your sendability. People mass unsubscribing looks like you sent spam. So either do what Matt said or delete them from Mailchimp yourself, but do not tell them to unsub.

 

[jft135]

Pro Tip: Do not TELL them to Unsubscribe, a mass unsubscribe from your emails will affect your sendability. People mass unsubscribing looks like you sent spam. So either do what Matt said or delete them from Mailchimp yourself, but do not tell them to unsub.

I know. I'd never tell them too, and even if I did, they wouldn't see it since they never open anything

 

[Y.F.N.C.G.]

Yeah, I do web development and my client base is national, so a local client base may be a bit different because you want ensure they are actually still local. In that case, a scrub might be worth it if it saves you some money.

 

[callthatgirl]

I clean up lists about once a year. I go back 10 newsletters and remove those that haven't opened. Keeps the price down. But I don't do this for all the lists. And actually, I quit doing frequent newsletters, doing quarterly now and only with updates. No more tips. My last email had a 34% open rate, happy with that.

 

[jft135]

For anyone who's interested:

I sent my customer list to a list cleanup service (I use Melissa Data it's $2.95/1K records min $50/list) which I do once a year anyway to get change of address data and avoid wasting money on mailings. It keeps my list clean which makes it infinitely more valuable if I ever sell the business.

Once I updated all of that info and exported it from PCRT to Mailchimp, I created a segment of anyone not in my state (we're smack in the middle of the state, so that works well for us) who had not opened any of the last 5 campaigns. I found just over 500 emails that are most likely useless to me, and cleaned them from my list.

If you live in a giant state, or on the border of a few states, you can find websites that will generate a list of all the zipcodes in a specified radius, and then using some advanced Excel skills create a list of anyone outside of that radius. I grabbed everyone more than 50 miles away, cross referenced it like above, and managed to clean another 60ish addresses. That's more work than I'm willing to do on a regular basis though, so in the future I'll probably stick to sorting by state only. I was curious how big of a difference it would make.

 

[AndrewFergus]

Thanks everyone I used this to narrow my Mailchimp list down under the 2000 mark so I have free use until the list grows again. I did find to my frustration that you cannot remove anyone that unsubscribed or bounced even though you cannot email them they are counted against your list size