Hey,

One of the longest running debates in Indieland is whether you should cull your mailing list – i.e. whether you should periodically remove subscribers who are not opening your emails.

Hey, we don't get out much!

While it's not quite Kindle Unlimited vs Wide, or pantsers vs. plotters, it can get pretty heated at times.

Maybe it sounds like something too technical to have such a passionate discussion around, but email is the most valuable marketing tool going; the practices you adopt around it can make a big difference to your bottom line.

And money adds spice to any debate, I guess.

There’s genuinely a lot at stake here. If you have a list of any reasonable size, you will understand its power – especially if you engage in best practices around your mailing list.

I’m going to present both sides of the debate with as much intellectual fairness as I can muster… before getting off that fence and roundly filleting one of them.

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I can personally confirm it works, after contracting a serious dose of Black Friday fever last year. 😅

This special price ends in two days according to AppSumo, so if you want the best stock photo deal going, act now.

And while you are over there, you will see AppSumo are running a giant, viral Black Friday competition with all sorts of great prizes – which you might want to enter!

To Cull or Not To Cull?

The debate about list culling often centers on costs.

Spoiler Alert: I’m going to argue the real discussion should be around deliverability, i.e. maximizing the number of people receiving (and opening and engaging with) your emails.

But let’s run through the cost angle first, as that’s how the debate is usually framed – which does a disservice to both sides IMO. Anyway, the bigger your mailing list, the reasoning goes, the more expensive it is to run. Over time you will accrue a lot of dead weight, especially if you are very proactive in growing that list. Each sign-up not opening your emails anymore is wasted money.

This is true, but anyone with a big list knows there’s a weakness in the rationale here.

Namely, once you have grown to that point, the cost of the list isn’t such a concern. Simply put, you are making enough money where this doesn’t matter like before, especially because email isn’t expensive in relative terms. A big list is a huge driver of income, and the cost of the services is quite small versus the money it routinely brings in.

Furthermore, opponents of list culling argue, being free from these concerns save time and headspace – two things that become exponentially more valuable them money when you’re doing well. Besides, the tracking systems aren’t perfect and if there’s any chance the next new release email reaches them, then a few dollars extra per month is easily worth it.

Putting in stark terms, there’s a different calculus in play when you’re starting out, trying to build a sustainable business, versus actively growing an established and profitable concern.

I’m merely stating the logic of the other side here – in what I hope is a fair manner.

The argument is not without validity but it falls down in the next step-when it goes in for the kill and talks about open rates. Culling your list, opponents say, could be viewed as a vanity exercise which artificially boosts your open rates.

It just makes you feel good, in other words, without actually doing anything for you in real terms – and at the likely cost of losing some readers too. It’s small-time thinking, the implication seems to be, when you really should be looking at the bigger picture.

Why This Argument Is Completely Wrong

Whatever way you feel about the previous points made above, it’s all somewhat moot as there is one decisive aspect completely missing from this discussion, and most debates around this topic.

Deliverability.

And once you factor in deliverability, this debate is over – in my opinion. You are free to disagree, of course. But please allow me to make my case before deciding your position.

Simply put, the most important reason for culling your list is to improve your sender reputation in the eyes of Gmail, and similar services. But Gmail is the big one, obviously, the most popular email service in the world – so that’s what I’m going to focus on here.

Gmail assigns a sender reputation to every domain that sends an email to it, and this sender reputation is the primary influence over whether your email drops into Inbox, is shunted into Promotions, gets buried in Spam, or even if it is zapped altogether before even making it into your Spam folder.

You really want to avoid that Spam folder, aside from obvious reasons, because every time an email gets marked Spam, your sender reputation takes a hit. Every time your emails are deleted unopened, your sender reputation takes another hit. And every time a reader’s Spam box gets emptied, with one of your emails languishing there unknown, guess what? Your sender reputation takes another hit.

When your sender reputation degrades, you will find it even harder to avoid Promotions, Spam, or being zapped altogether – and this can become something of a death spiral for your newsletter, forcing you to engage in more elaborate (and expensive) lead generation schemes to replace all the readers on your list who are going dark.

In other words, by not trimming your list every so often, the people who are receiving and enjoying your newsletter can actually stop getting it.

Unengaged subscribers have a corrosive effect on your entire list, and if you don’t attempt to re-engage them, you are creating a problem for yourself – particularly if you don’t cull those who you can’t re-engage.

If you don’t trim the fat, the whole system gets gunked up.

But if you do engage in list culling – if you weed out the terminally disengaged – then you create a different kind of feedback loop. One where your sender reputation improves with each email blast, instead of worsening.

And guess what this means long term? Gmail puts more and more of your emails into Inbox, instead of Promotions or Spam, increasing your open rates, your click rates, and your purchase rates. It’s an ongoing, cumulative effect which maximizes the deliverability of your email list.

You can think what you like – please do! – but, for me, that ends the argument.

But What About...

I’m sure there will be objections, though, so let’s run through the typical ones.

It is, which is why I generally recommend attempting to re-engage first. If you can’t re-engage, then consider culling. Re-engagement can take many forms, and can be a quick email, the dangling of a new cookie, or a more elaborate process, depending on what suits you and your list.

It’s not! I do this like once a year. Some authors do it more frequently, but I don’t see the need personally. Perhaps I would do it more regularly if I was being more aggressive about sign-ups, perhaps doing more lead generation ads or big giveaways where I get a lot of ‘inorganic’ subscribers at once. Maybe.

Besides – and this is really important – most of the work here surrounds re-engagement, which you should be doing anyway. As in, even if you are on Team Nevercull, you should be attempting to re-engage subscribers who have gone dark.

This is a fair question, but as I covered in detail last summer, the way Apple is messing with our open rates is super important here. Rather than not reporting open data at all – as some seem to be assuming – Apple is reporting all emails processed by Apple Mail as instantly opened (by a generic IP).

Why does this matter? Because this means you will get some false positives of opens on your list, rather than false positives of unopens. (Wow that’s a lot of negatives in one sandwich!).

In other words, by engaging in list culling in the recommended way you will miss some people you should be culling, rather than the other way around, so it doesn’t increase the danger of culling people who are actually opening your messages.

Basically, it’s fine.

This is the most solid point, in my opinion.

Open tracking isn’t perfect, for all the reasons mentioned and more. And because Apple is muddying that picture too, a lot of email experts have been recommending making your emails… more clicky in general.

This is best practice anyway, quite handily. You always want more engagement with your newsletters for a million reasons.

Clicks are measured by a totally different system that Apple’s changes don’t affect at all – and are unlikely to in the future (as they are based on redirects and I can’t see anyone banning redirects).

Between click data and open data and organic replies, we get a pretty decent picture of engagement. And with a good list culling process, you can build in safeguards to minimize the chances of removing anyone incorrectly.

To give a very simple example, sending a Stay/Go email to anyone who is being considered for culling is one way to build such a failsafe. I’m not suggesting you just start unsubscribing people who don’t appear to be opening your emails – there’s a process before you get to that point, which minimizes any errors. And the first step of that is attempting re-engagement.

I’ll talk about how to do it in the safest way in a future email but let me just say that you can be as aggressive or as conservative as you like.

(I’m actually quite conservative myself in terms of list culling. Less so when it comes to trying new and exciting hams.)

Warning: Not An Actual Cookie

There is an ancillary – and just as technical – debate about double opt-in versus single opt-in, and if you are thinking that all the same arguments can be made in favor of double opt-in, then you get a cookie!

I’ll be back next Friday for the holiest day of the marketing year and your Deals Sherpa has been working extra hard – nabbing you some exclusives this year too. Oh yes.

But there’s one deal which won’t be in that email – not at this price. I don’t have inside info on this, by my guess is that $35 deal on DepositPhotos is a pricing error because they are warning that the price will rise on Monday when the actual Black Friday sale starts over there.

Either way, if you’re interested in it, grab it before Sunday!

Dave

P.S. Deal curating music this week is Simon & Garfunkel with America.