Why removing your email subscribers actually makes your open rates better.

Month I saw our newsletter open rate go below twelve percent. I thought our content was losing its touch so I spent weeks changing lines and changing layouts.

The real problem was about delivering emails, not the content. Gmail and Apple Mail watch how many people actually look at your messages. If thousands of people never open your emails each week the email providers start sending your domain to the promotions or spam folders for everyone

I got a list of fourteen thousand subscribers who had never opened an email in six months. It felt hard to lose that group. I sent one last plain-text message asking if they wanted to stay. Four hundred people clicked to stay so I removed the rest from our list.

The change was quick and big. Our open rate went up, to thirty-four percent the next week and our clicks doubled. By stopping the signs of not engaging our emails finally got into the inboxes of people who really wanted to read them.

Stop making your email provider hold contacts who never pay attention. Do you clean your subscriber list regularly. Do you keep everyone hoping they might come back?