Cold Subscriber Cleanup Guide: Why We Trimmed Our Email List by 23,000

As online creators and business owners, we’re conditioned to want to see numbers go up. We want more subscribers, followers, revenue…

But when it comes to your email list, lowering your subscriber count once in a while can be a good thing. Because a large list ultimately doesn’t matter if it’s not engaged.

By February 2024, 17% of our email list had gone cold. That means 24.5k subscribers hadn’t opened or engaged with our emails in more than month (ConvertKit’s definition of a cold subscriber).

This is the time of year when I run our annual cold subscriber reengagement email campaign and remove anyone who doesn’t want to stay.

The result: a slightly smaller but more active list, increasing our open and click rates that better reflect what’s actually working in our email marketing.

In this blog post, I share how exactly I reengaged our cold subscribers, what the results were, and what I learned about why subscribers might go cold.

Reengaging cold subscribers

To start, I selected all cold subscribers in ConvertKit and applied a tag, which triggered a simple sequence of three emails sent three days apart from each other.

Note: I made sure to remove any customers because we’ll definitely want to keep these on our list even if they had gone cold.

Here is the first email of the sequence as an example:

“Hey there,

Once upon a time you subscribed to the Forte Labs newsletter, downloaded some of my free content, or purchased one of my courses.

But it seems like you haven’t opened my emails in the last few months (at least that’s what our email service provider is telling us).

Since I don’t want to clutter your inbox, I’m going to stop sending you emails such as my weekly newsletter with my best ideas on productivity and personal knowledge management.

But...

If the past months have just been busy or you are *in fact* reading my emails, **click here to keep receiving emails from me**.

If not, no hard feelings!

Thanks so much for allowing me to share with you over the past weeks and months.

Let me know if you’d like to hop back in at any time in the future!

Best,
Tiago”

Subscribers who click the link are removed from the tag, from the remaining emails in the sequence, and won’t be deleted at the end of it.

How did the reengagement sequence do?

From the 24k cold subscribers who received this sequence, 896 decided to stay on our list.

That meant that I removed around 23k cold subscribers from our list (after exporting them for safekeeping and analysis). Our email list went down from 139k to 116k subscribers in total.

That’s about 10k more than we deleted in 2023 and 2022 respectively.

Where does this increase in cold subscribers come from? I had an idea…

Are subscribers from ConvertKit’s Creator Network more likely to go cold?

In the beginning of 2023, we were one of the first to join ConvertKit’s new Creator Network. As part of the network, other creators recommend our newsletter to their subscribers and vice versa.

By February 2024, we’ve gained over 11k subscribers from the Creator Network alone. And according to ConvertKit’s stats, the open and click rates of subscribers from the Creator Network look solid (and even slightly exceed average open and click rates of our weekly newsletter).

But when diving deeper, I found that a whooping 25% of these 11k subscribers had ended up on our cold subscriber list.

That alone doesn’t tell me if subscribers from the Creator Network are more likely to go cold. So I compared it to subscribers from two other sources.

Our Second Brain Quickstart Guide (a 6-day email course) is another major entry point to our email list. Only 6% of subscribers from this lead magnet went cold.

How about our popular PARA Cheat Sheet (a PDF guide)? Only 4% of subscribers who downloaded the cheat sheet went cold.

What could be the reason for this difference? Subscribers from the Creator Network likely haven’t engaged with our content when they opt in. And even though we send them a welcome email sequence, this doesn’t seem sufficient to get everyone invested in and excited about what we share.

It shows that the source of your subscribers matters when it comes to engagement and even monetization.

While this seems to explain some of the increase in cold subscribers, it doesn’t quite cover everything.

What else might explain an increase in cold subscribers?

Rapid growth: A sudden jump in email list size can sometimes bring in subscribers who are less inherently interested in your content or who subscribed for a one-time benefit and are less likely to engage long-term. However, we’ve seen mainly steady growth throughout the year.

Changes in frequency: Too many emails might overwhelm subscribers, leading them to disengage, while too few might cause them to lose interest or forget about your brand. While our newsletter frequency hasn’t changed, we did send more emails overall last year due to more product launches.

Spam filters and promotions tabs: Not reaching the primary inbox of your subscribers reduces the visibility and open rates of your emails. We should include clear instructions in our welcome emails for how to move our emails to the primary tab.

Content Relevance: Ultimately, what you share needs to be valuable and relevant for your subscribers. Otherwise, they’ll tune out. We’re kicking off a project with email expert Brennan Dunn to segment our list and personalize our emails so our subscribers get exactly what they’re looking for.

How long have cold subscribers been on our list?

In other words, have cold subscribers predominantly been our list longer or shorter compared to active subscribers? This is another question I was curious about.

The 23k cold subscribers have been on our list for an average of 427 days with a median of 352 days.

In comparison, all active subscribers have been on our list for an average of 485 days with a median of 382 days.

This seems to indicate that the “time on list” itself doesn’t have a significant impact on someone going cold.

If you’re curious, here’s a histogram of the “time on list” for our cold subscribers. (The outlier on the far right side is subscribers from the initial import of Tiago’s email list to ConvertKit when he switched over from Mailchimp.)

How to clean your own email list

If you’re using ConvertKit, I recommend checking out this article on their blog. It also includes instructions and a template for automatically cleaning your list. This automation reengages subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a pre-defined number of days and will unsubscribe anyone who doesn’t want to stay.

I’m curious…have you ever cleaned your email list? What questions do you have about this process? Please let me know!