engage or die

Got a ton of replies to my email yesterday about “ghost subscribers”...

Where I recommended only mailing to active subscribers who’ve opened or clicked at least once in the last 90 days.

Most of which went something like this:

In other words, the questions on everyone’s minds was:

What next?

Should you send them into some kind of reactivation sequence?

Or just delete them?

Here’s my two cents:

I’ve found reactivation sequences to be pretty much useless.

I had one in place for a while on this list…

And the lifetime open rate on the best email in the sequence was 11%.

So I flipped it off.

Could I have tweaked and tinkered and maybe improved that a teeny tiny bit?

Sure.

But in my experience:

Once people are tuned out, the likelihood they’re going to tune back in is slim to none.

As evidenced by that crappy open rate.

Unless you’re operating a massive list with 100k+ subscribers…

It’s window dressing.

I’d much rather focus my efforts upstream of disengaged subscribers…

Namely:

By writing emails people enjoy reading and sending them every day.

That’s the 80/20 lever here.

Otherwise, you’re majoring in the minors.

Now I have an automation that deletes inactive subs after 120 days.

This leaves a bit of buffer room for the odd person outside the 90 day window to stumble across one of my emails in their inbox and decide to reengage.

That’s it, though.

No begging or pleading.

It’s engage or die here in the Newsletter Freedomverse 😂

Thankfully, this keeps my list lean, mean, and clean…

And my open rates at 50% or above.

Which, for a daily newsletter, is great.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say on this topic for now.

Hope it’s helpful :)

Jim Hamilton