Unsubscribe
When I first took my business from 1:1 to 1:many I was nearly obsessed with tracking my email subscribers (see picture below). For me, the magic hurdle was 1,000 subscribers. Don’t ask me why. I felt like if I could make it to that number - I’d have made it.
Screenshot of my subscriber stats from December 2019.
But the thing no one tells you about email subscribers is that they are not created equal.
There are people who:
Opt-in via a freebie and never open it
Join an event, webinar, or FB Live and then never come back
Sign up for your email list and then get busy or switch jobs
Whatever it is - growing your email list is one thing, but having a healthy email list is another. To date, my average open rate teeters between 35-45%, but I occationally get above 50%. My average open rate for the month of December is 44.8%.
Want to know how I get such high rates? Outside of producing epic value-add content regularly, I invite people to unsubscribe from my email list.
Since I’m about to do it again - I thought I would share the latest email sequence and parameters I plan to use in case it’s helpful for you to do a scrub of your email list too.
First, I pull a list of anyone who hasn’t opened an email from me in the last 90 days (this is on the more agressive side. If you’re not comfortable with 90 days, try 6 months).
Next, I create a segment of those people. For this next round, it comes out to 213 people or about 8% of my current email list.
Next, I will put these people through a 3-part email series. If they don’t open any of the emails - I wish them well and remove them from my list.
That’s it!
I do the same for my Instagram subscribers too, but on the front end. That means when I get a new follower, I proactively go to their profile and look to see if they resemble a real person interested in nonprofit fundraising content or not. Dead giveaways are anyone to do with trading, Bitcoin or coaches (you know who I’m talking about - the bots are not hard to spot). For me, it’s not about the vanity number (now that I’m past that mental 1,000 number!) - it’s about quality over quantity.