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The Amy Porterfield Show
Delete These Subscribers Now (Why a Smaller Email List Makes You More Money)
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Before we dive in. If you're a six figure female founder and your business feels harder than it should, this is for you. You've built something real, but sustaining it is exhausting. And that's usually not an ever problem. It's a systems problem. This week I'm hosting a free live training called the Revenue Consistency Formula. I'll show you how to align all the parts of your marketing so that your messaging, offers and leads are connected versus competing with each other. This is the answer to moving out of overwhel and into predictable revenue. You can save your spot@amyporterfield.com forward slash training. All right, let's go ahead and jump in. Your most loyal subscribers might stop seeing your emails because the algorithm has decided you're not a priority. I have 5,000 subscribers. I should be seeing certain results. When the real issue is that they're not emailing 5,000 engaged people. That changes how you show up. You can actually trust the data now. You can make real decisions based on what you're actually seeing. Revenue starts to feel predictable. A clean list is a. My guest today is a dear friend of mine. One of them goes, that one over there. She's big money and it was my guest today. Her name is Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield, the ever amazing best selling author of two weeks notice. Ms. Amy Porterfield. You may not expect me to say this, but I want you to start deleting people from your email list. Not one or two hundreds, maybe even thousands depending on what your email list looks like. Now, I know that feels like the complete opposite of everything you hear about growing an email list. And you've likely heard it from me as well. You gotta grow your email list. More subscribers equals more sales. The money is in the list. And I do believe that the money is in the list. However, what we haven't talked about enough and what I want to really talk about today is that a big email list full of people who do not open or do not engage with your emails is actually a liability and it might be the reason your results don't match your effort. Now here's the nuance. You don't necessarily have to delete them from your system entirely. I don't. I keep all of our subscribers in our CRM, so all of their data is in our CRM because that information is valuable to for tracking and reporting. And also if someone was a customer a long time ago, you don't want to just delete them just because they're not opening up your emails anymore. But we do Remove them from our main email list, the one that gets our newsletters, our promotions, our launches. We stop emailing them the same content that we send to our engaged email list. Instead, we segment them out. Our engaged subscribers get our regular emails. Our disengaged subscribers get a different approach designed to either bring them back or confirm they're done. That one shift changes everything about how our email marketing performs. A few years ago, I was looking at our email metrics, and something wasn't adding up. We had a solid list size, but our open rates were declining. Click rates, very much down. And when we launched, the response didn't match the size of the list. And that's when we got serious about segmentation. We created an engaged list of people who were actually opening, clicking, and buying. And we created a separate approach for people who had gone quiet. Our open rates went up. Our click rates went up. Our deliverability. This part's important. Our deliverability improved, and we could more accurately predict our launch success because we were focused on the people who were actually wanting to hear from us. So list health matters just as much as list growth, and we don't talk about that enough. So I'm going to say it one more time. List health matters just as much as list growth. And list health starts with knowing who's engaged and who's not. Today, I'm going to teach you why you need to stop treating your entire email list the same. How to identify who's engaged and who isn't. And exactly how to communicate with each group so you can get better results from the list you already have. Let's dive in. I want to start off by talking about what happens when a chunk of your list has stopped engaging. Number one, your deliverability suffers. Email providers like Gmail, Yahoo. Outlook, they track engagement. They're watching how many people open your emails, how many people ignore them, how many. How many people mark them as spam. When a large percentage of your list ignores your emails, those providers start making assumptions about your content. They think people don't seem to want this, so they start filtering you out. Your emails land in spam folders. They get buried in the promotions tab. Ugh, that tab. It just kills me. They never make it to the primary inbox. And here's the worst part. This doesn't just affect the people who aren't engaging. It affects everyone. Even your most loyal subscribers might stop seeing your emails because the algorithm has decided you're not a priority. So you could write the best email of your life with the perfect subject line, but if the algorithm thinks people don't want to hear from you, it won't matter. Now we know how long it takes to write a really good email, a really good newsletter. You do not want that happening to you. Number two, you're paying for subscribers who will never buy from you. Most email platforms charge based on list size. Kit, kajabi, activecampaign, mailchimp, flodesk, etc. The more subscribers you have, the more you pay. Every month, you're spending money to store subscribers who haven't opened an email from you in six months or maybe longer. That's money going toward people who forgot they signed up, who've moved on, who aren't interested anymore for any reason whatsoever. Now, I'm not saying that's a huge expense, but it definitely adds up. And it's wasteful. It's money you could be putting towards something that actually grows your business. Number three, your data becomes unreliable. To me, I feel like this is the biggest one. Remember how I said earlier that we could better predict our launch success because we were able to clean up our email so we knew the people that were engaging? That was like a real data point. Well, this is what I mean here. Your data becomes unreliable when you have an email list full of people that are not interested. And this one is sneaky because you might not realize it's happening. You're looking at your open rates thinking, I need better subject lines. You're looking at your click rates thinking, my content is not landing. People are not liking this. You're second guessing your strategy based on numbers that look underwhelming. But those numbers are being dragged down by people who were never going to engage anyway. If 40% of your list hasn't opened an email in six months, they're pulling your metrics down every single time you hit send. So when you clean your list, suddenly you can see what's actually happening. You, you can see how your engaged audience is responding and makes decisions based on accurate information. To me, that's the biggest one. But number four, it does affect your confidence. This one doesn't get talked about enough. You look at your list size and you have expectations. You think, I have 5,000 subscribers, so I should be seeing certain results. And a lot of my students, they say, I should be making more money. I have 5,000 people on my email list. I. I should be making more money with this list. And when those results don't come through, they start questioning everything. Their offer, their messaging, and their ability to run their business. When the real issue is that they're not actually emailing 5,000 engaged people. I mean, in this situation, if this was you, you're emailing probably 2,500 engaged people and 2,500 people who checked out a long time ago. So cleaning your list lets you see what's actually happening and you're able to make more accurate, data driven decisions based on those metrics. So how do you know who to remove? Let me walk you through exactly how to identify your disengaged subscribers. Start with your email platform. Most platforms make this pretty easy. You're looking for a way to create a segment based on engagement. Look for filters like hasn't opened an email in the last 90 days. Some platforms call this cold subscribers or inactive subscribers. 90 days is a good starting point. That's roughly three months of emails they've ignored. That's a pattern. If your platform doesn't have this exact filter, look at your last 10 or 15 emails. Who hasn't opened any of them? That's your starting segment. Now check progress Purchase history. This step is important. Before you finalize your segment, look who's actually buying from you. Some people don't open emails regularly, but they do purchase. I think that's me. So maybe they see your email come through and it reminds them to go to your website directly. Maybe they're reading the preview text without actually officially opening up that email. They might just engage with your brand differently. If someone has purchased from you in the last 90 days, take them out of your disengaged segment. Because that's engagement. That's really good engagement. Whether they're reading it or not, they want to buy. So you don't want to merge them into your disengaged segment. And then finally consider how long they've been on your list. Someone who joined your list two weeks ago and hasn't opened anything yet is still new and needs more time. Someone who joined your list a year ago and hasn't opened anything in the last three months, well, that's a different story. They've had plenty of opportunities to engage and they haven't. Your disengaged segment should be people who have been on your list long enough to know what you're all about and have consistently chosen to not engage. So here's what your final segment looks like. Subscribers who haven't opened any email in 90 days haven't purchased in 90 days and have been on your list for at least 1090 days. As long as someone is opening your emails, they belong on your engaged list. You're only Looking at people who have gone completely quiet. That's your list of quiet quitters. The people who are technically subscribed but mentally gone. Now, you're not just going to cut these people off without warning. You're going to give them a chance to come back first. This is called a re engagement campaign. So let me walk you through exactly how to set one up. First, set up a short email sequence. You're going to send two or three emails specifically to your disengaged segment. Space them out over about a week. Now, these emails have one job and one job only. Get them to take action or confirm they're done. Your subject line needs to be direct. These people haven't been opening your emails, so you need something that breaks the pattern. Here are some examples. Are you still there? Should I stop emailing you? I'm cleaning up my list. Last chance to stay. Do you still want to hear from me? Kind of a little desperate, but that's the point. Like they should. They should have a little emotion behind them. So these work because they're honest and they create a small amount of urgency. Like, I might sound desperate that when I say, like, do you still want to hear from me? But it can come across the other way. Like, hey, do you still want to hear from me? Like, I'm taking you off my list. If not. So it could be desperate energy, or it could be just like cool confidence. Like, take it or leave it, it doesn't matter. But these actually work and you do want that urgency. So they pay attention. The person has to know something is about to change. So keep the email body super simple and short. Don't try to resell them on your entire brand. Keep it short and clear. So here's a simple structure. Acknowledge that they haven't been opening something like, I noticed you haven't opened my emails in a while. Then tell them you respect their inbox. Something like, I only want to be in your inbox if you're getting value. And then give them one clear action. Something like, if you want to keep getting my emails, click the button below. Let them know what happens if they don't. So something like, if I don't hear from you, I. I'll stop sending you my regular emails. No hard feelings. That's it. Short, honest, clear. Include one call to action. Make it obvious that they need to do something to stay a button that says yes, keep me on the list or I still want your emails. Something like that will work. Link it to a simple confirmation page or even just back to your website, but I kind of like to tell them like hey good, you're still on the list. So a confirmation page is probably the best. Now the click is what matters. That's how they tell you they want to stay. So here's how to structure your sequence. Email one Let them know you noticed they've been quiet and ask if they still want to hear from you. Email 2 remind them that you're cleaning up your list and this is their last chance to stay. Email 3 Optional Final Notice I'm moving inactive subscribers off my regular email list tomorrow. Click here if you want to stay. Every email has the Click this link if you want to stay in some way or another. So some people will re engage after email 1. Some will wait until the final notice, some won't respond at all. Hate to interrupt, but at the time I'm releasing this podcast, we're days away from my free live training where I'll teach the Revenue Consistency formula. If you're a six figure female founder who's getting leads but struggling to convert them, if you've leaned into your ambition to get here and you're ready to stop being the only one making it all run, or if your business is doing a lot of things well but none of it feels connected and growth is slow, this training is for you. I'm going to show you why doing less better is the key to your next six figure jump. How you go from what worked to get here to what's going to take you well past it without adding more to your already full business. That's the revenue consistency formula. Save your seat@amyporterfield.com Training now back to the show. After your sequence is done, give it a few days, then look at who clicks and who didn't. Anyone who clicked gets moved back to your engaged segment. They've told you that they want to hear from you. Great. Anyone who didn't click on any of the emails gets moved to your disengaged segment. They'll stop receiving all of your emails. No newsletters, no promotions, no launch emails, nothing. Now remember when I said that if you keep people on your email list that never engage with you, you're literally paying for them to be on your email list, even though they're never going to engage and never going to buy. Well, here's where it gets a little bit tricky. Some CRMs will allow you to move these people to a do not email list and you don't get charged for them. But not all CRMs have that functionality. So you want to do your research on yours. And if it doesn't allow you to do something like this, then you could consider deleting anyone who hasn't engaged. Maybe you get them into that disengaged list after 90 days. Maybe you try a few more months of engagement and maybe after six months, if they've never opened an email, they haven't engaged in your. Your unengaged sequence and they've never bought from you, I would delete them from your list. So you've got some options here. But I just wanted to make that really clear. You don't have to delete them, but after six months and they've never been a buyer, I'd get them off your list. So there you go. Now again, I want to back up a little bit because I mentioned something that I didn't really get into earlier. So let's say you send them through the RE Engagement campaign. I think I said it weird earlier, but that's what it's called, a RE Engagement campaign. So you send them through your RE Engagement campaign and that means that they haven't touched your emails for 90 days. Now you're trying to say, hey, come on back. And they don't. You can then email them a little later down the line. So you can do smaller email campaigns, maybe 60 days from then, or 30 days, whatever you want and try a few more times. But when, in my opinion, when you get to six months and you've tried several re engagement campaigns over that six months and they still haven't opened, that's when I'm like, just delete them from your CRM. Or if the CRM allows you to do a do not email list and you don't get charged for them, put them there. Good. Are we on the same page? Great. Okay, so, and I wanted to say that some of them actually might re engage. They might not have touched an email for 90 days and then you do a mini RE engagement campaign again 30, 60 days later and they do. You have no idea. They could have a had a death in their family, they maybe lost their job and they just had to like disengage from everything and get their life back together. Life happens, right? So that's why I always like to give it a little extra time, a little extra push. We never know what people are going through, but after that six months, I think it's fair to say they're not interested anymore. And the thing is, it's. It, it could feel like dating. When someone doesn't want to date you anymore, they're not asking you to go out on a date, they're not engaging with you. We can't take that vibe, right? Like, we can't go down that road. This is not personal. You have no idea, like I said earlier, what's going on in their world. And if you put your energy or focus on someone who doesn't want to open your emails versus someone that needs you so, so much and is hanging on every word of that newsletter, you're doing it wrong. Right? So let's put our energy in the people that want to hear from us or all the people out there that don't know we exist yet, but we're going to put amazing content out there to get them on our email list, love them up, and support them the way that you know you can do so. It's also like an energy shift here that you need to be very careful not to take any, any of this personally. Okay? So once you've done all that, here's what you can expect to see, because this is where it gets exciting. Your open rates go up. When you remove the people who never open. Your open rate naturally increases. And it's real. You're now measuring engagement among people who actually want to hear from you. Higher open rates signal to email providers that your content is wanted. That improves your deliverability across the board. Also, your click rates go up. Same principle, when you're emailing an engaged audience. More people click. Your content is landing with people who are paying attention. Your data becomes useful. This is the one I keep coming back to. Now. When you look at your email metrics, you're seeing the truth. You can actually tell what subject line works, what content resonates, and what offers get traction. Because if you have an email list of people that in the last 60 to 90 days they have engaged with you and you send out a boring subject line and now you see that your open rates decline this week versus last week. It's not that you have a. It's not because you have a list of tons of people who aren't paying attention, period, is that that subject line was not as powerful. See what I mean about you can actually trust the data now. You can make real decisions based on what you're actually seeing. And to me, that's the most powerful part of this whole thing. Also, your emails land in the primary inbox. Oh, that primary inbox. When your engagement goes up, email providers notice. They start treating your emails as priority. More of your emails hit the primary inbox. Fewer get filtered to that stupid promotions tab, or worse yet, spam so this means even more of your engaged subscribers to your content. And it's a positive cycle. And here's the big one. You can trust your list, which boosts your confidence. When you sit down to write an email or you plan a launch, you know that the people on your list want to be there. They've either engaged recently or actively chosen to stay. That changes how you show up. You're not wondering if anyone's listening. You know they are. And here's what happened to us after we did this with our email list. We realized that once we knew who was actually engaged, we could be smarter about how we communicated with new subscribers too. So we built a brand new nurture funnel for people joining our newsletter. The idea is simple. When someone new joins your list, don't pitch them right away. Nurture them first. I always say, love up on them. Build a relationship. Send them valuable content consistently so so they actually get to know you and trust you before you ever ask them to buy. And when we eventually did ask them to buy, we saw a huge difference. During our digital course academy launch, we sent over 200 emails. I know the ones that went to subscribers who had gone through that nurture funnel ranked in the top 10 for engagement in sales, meaning if they went through the nurture funnel, they were more likely to engage and buy. That tells you everything you need to know about what a healthy engaged list can do. That's what's possible when your list is healthy, your segmentation is dialed in and you're intentional about how you nurture new subscribers. So if you are not on my email list yet, if you are, don't do this and use another email. It's just going to get you double emails from me. You don't, you don't want to do that. But if you've never ever joined my email list and you go to amyporterfield.com forward/newsletter, it will then send you through a new nurture sequence and show you a little bit of what I'm talking about. Amyporterfield.com forward/newsletter and if you are not getting my newsletter every single Tuesday morning, well then go there. Amyporterfield.com forward/newsletter because something's going on. If you think you're on my email list but you're not getting my newsletter, then something is amiss there. Okay? So just wanted to give you a little taste of what it could look like. So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. Your email list is one of the most valuable assets in your business. I've been saying that for 17 years. It is still true today as it was 17 years ago. It's how you launch. It's how you generate revenue. And like any valuable asset, any it needs maintenance. Subscribers don't stay engaged forever. People's interests change and inboxes get crowded. That's okay and normal. Your job is to keep your list healthy by staying interesting and studying what works and what doesn't work and changing things up and keeping people on their toes so they can't wait to get your emails. So here's your action step. Go into your email platform and create a segment of subscribers who haven't opened in the last 90 days. Look at how many people are in that segment. That's your starting point. Then you're going to set up a simple re engagement sequence. Give those people a chance to re engage and move. The ones who don't respond to a separate segment or eventually you're going to just delete them off your list. And then you're going to keep doing this. This isn't a one and done thing. Set a reminder to check your list every quarter. Make it part of how you maintain your business. The more consistent you are with this, the healthier your list stays and the better your emails perform over time. A clean list is a powerful list. Notice I didn't say a big email list. A clean, healthy list is what makes you money, not just a big email list. And once you've taken care of it, the next step is making sure the rest of your business is set up to support it. This part's important, so come back to me if you're multitasking. A healthy list only works if you have something valuable to send them, something valuable to sell them, and a clear path that connects those things so people actually buy. When all of that is aligned, revenue starts to feel predictable. That's exactly what I'm teaching in my free training coming up called the Revenue Consistency Formula. I'm going to show you how to look at your business and identify what's out of alignment so you can stop spinning your wheels and start seeing consistent growth. So you can go to amyporterfield.com forward/training to sign up. It's free. It is really, really valuable. Knowing what's out of alignment in your marketing allows you to make that fix and start seeing that predictable revenue that I know you want. Amyporterfield.com forward/training thanks so much for tuning into this episode. I hope it helped you see that taking care of your email list doesn't have to be complicated, but it is a system that you need to put together and also a great reminder that a clean, engaged list is one of the most powerful assets you can have in your business. If you're watching on YouTube and enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, be sure to follow and subscribe to the show. I'll talk to you soon.