How to Properly Remove Cold Subscribers in ConvertKit (and Improve Email Open Rates!)
Everyone loves gaining more email subscribers.
But I’ve seen the obsession get out of hand where people want more and more and more… and you have to wonder — how many people on their list are actually opening those emails?
Email lists naturally end up with people that don’t really want to be subscribed, but are too busy/lazy/what-have-you to actually open your email and click UNSUBSCRIBE. So you need to give them the boot yourself! But first, you’ve gotta make sure you aren’t removing anyone you shouldn’t!
This involves three major pieces:
- Create a list of true cold subscribers.
- Give those chilly, cold subscribers a chance to stay with a re-engagement campaign.
- Delete those who didn’t re-engage (and don’t feel guilty about it).
This post walks you through exactly how to do all this with ConvertKit, with some tricks along the way to ensure you’re doing it right.
If you aren’t on ConvertKit, still have a look – there’s relevant advice along the way as well as links at the end for doing this on other platforms.
Why You Should Remove Cold Subscribers from Your Email List
Cut out those who aren’t interested
As someone who writes about blogging and online business, I know that people don’t blog forever. Or maybe they joined my email list because they were starting out and never got even their blogs off the ground.
If you write about life with young children, maybe their kids are older. If you write about teaching, maybe they became a stay at home mom or changed professions.
There are 100s of reasons someone might not be opening your emails that have NOTHING to do with you, so don’t take it personally!
Think quality over quantity.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Your email list could have cold subscribers for any number of reasons, so delete them to boost open rates! But first, run a re-engagement campaign. Here’s how.” quote=”Your email list could have cold subscribers for any number of reasons, so delete them to boost open rates! But first, run a re-engagement campaign. Here’s how.”]Boost your open rates
Would you rather have a list of 10,000 with only 8% opening your emails or a list of 5,000 with 35% opening your emails? (I’ll save you the math- that’s over double the number of people opening your stuff).
Average open rates vary per industry. Plus, larger lists generally have smaller open rates than smaller ones. That being said, I aim to have 30% of my list open my emails.
(Possibly) save money in email service provider fees
Most email service providers tier their services, meaning you’ll pay more for 10,000 subscribers than if you had 5,000. Once you cut away the inactive subscribers, you might see yourself in a lower tier and save a bit of cash… at least until you grow again!
Why You Shouldn’t Just Hit the Big Red Delete Button
They just might not be loading email images
If a subscriber isn’t loading your email images, they might be counted as cold. Email providers track open rates by placing a 1 x 1 pixel transparent image within your email. If that image gets loaded on their side, then viola! – that’s an open email. If someone’s email app defaults to not load images, and they never click to actually load the images, welp, that’s NOT an open.
They might just need a chance!
Maybe they forgot they signed up with an email they don’t check often. Maybe they had an emergency and got wayyyy behind on their email. Maybe they’re on sabbatical. Maybe they’re on a deserted island for the summer with no internet access. I mean, YOU NEVER KNOW. So give them a chance to re-engage!
Before you delete cold subscribers though, you want to run a re-engagement campaign to give those people onnnnnne last chance to stay on your list. Here’s how!
How to Run a Re-Engagement Campaign on ConvertKit (the Right Way)
ConvertKit defines Cold Subscribers as “anyone who hasn’t opened or clicked an email in the last 90 days and has been subscribed for at least 30 days.”
I first tried to follow ConvertKit’s own instructions, but it doesn’t account for two things when creating this list:
- Subscribers who get tagged when they join a course of mine but aren’t added to the email list.
- Users who haven’t been emailing their subscribers consistently on an AT LEAST weekly basis.
With that in mind, I decided I needed to build a DIFFERENT list of Cold Subscribers than what ConvertKit hands me on a platter. Some reasons you might need to refine your cold subscriber list:
- You have people on your list who are tagged as a customer, but not necessarily on your main email list.
- You don’t think one month is long enough to determine if they’re truly inactive as a subscriber.
- You’ve only emailed your list once this past month. (Yes you should be emailing your list more often than once a month, but that’s a post for a different day!)
This tutorial walks you through all of that step-by-step!
The Set Up
1. Create a tag called “CK Cold Subscribers” in ConvertKit.
Just go to Subscribers, then scroll down on the right column to the Create Tag link and name your tag. Easy peasy.
2. Use ConvertKit’s feature to create a list of Cold Subscribers.
If you have a simple email list, ConvertKit makes it super simple to find Cold Subscribers.
Just go to the Subscribers tab and then select Cold Subscribers from the giant drop-down menu.
GIANT, I tell ya.
(If you’re looking for a how-to for other platforms, scroll to the bottom where I dropped some resources for ya.)
3. Tag them as CK Cold Subscribers.
It might look like a lot of subscribers. But remember, these might not truly be dead cold!
Here you want to select ALL the subscribers classified as cold, not just the first 30 on page 1. So click “Select all xxxx subscribers in your account.” Then go to Bulk Actions and select Tag. Select your new “CK Cold Subscribers” tag from the drop-down.
It might take little while to update the tag with all the subscribers. Don’t freak if they don’t appear to get tagged right away!
If you are fine with ConvertKit’s definition of a Cold Subscriber, then skip the next step.
4. Create a segment to get to your TRUE Cold Subscribers (if Needed).
Again, do this step only if:
- You have people in your email system who do NOT get your main emails, like course students who might only get student update emails.
- You don’t think 30 days is long enough to make a subscriber cold and would like to go further back, like 60 or 90 days. (I wouldn’t go past 90 days)
You’ll need to filter them out of the cold subscribers so you have a true list of cold subscribers.
I did this by creating a new Segment called “TRUE Cold Subscribers” under the Subscribers tab. You can see below, I excluded people who had subscribed recently (at the time I took the screenshot it excluded people who had registered within the last 60 days).
I also excluded those who were subscribed to my courses because at the time I didn’t automatically add new students to my main email list.
Try to Re-Engage Your Cold Subscribers with a 2-Sequence Email Series
A re-engagement campaign gives cold subscribers a chance to stay on board before removing them from your list. You send them an email with a link to click if they want to stay on the list. If they don’t by a certain date, then bye-bye-bye!
I chose to send only two emails before removing those who didn’t click the link. Why? Because my response rates were so low that I didn’t feel I’d get many more “warmed up” subscribers for the time I’d spend on another email. (More on my results in a minute, but first, how to actually do this stuff.)
5. Create simple thank you page on your blog.
Before you send a re-engagement campaign, you need to create a new thank you page on your website to use as a way to “catch” the warmed up subscribers. In the emails you’ll ask those who want to keep getting your emails to click a link, then you’ll track that in ConvertKit (details in the next step).
Here’s what my page looks like. A couple of sentences and a fun GIF. Boom.
6. Set up an Automation to Flag Cold Subscribers as Still Interested.
Now that you have a thank you page, use the link to that page to create an automation in ConvertKit. Under Automations, select Create Rule, then use the following:
TRIGGER:
- Name: Warm & Toasty (or whatever you want to name the link)
- Destination URL: the thank you page URL you just made
ACTION:
- Select action as Add Tag.
- Create a new tag here called Warm & Toasty, then select it for the action.
Save and move along to step 7.
7. Write two re-engagement emails.
Now that all those pieces are done, you’re ready to create the emails! Feel free to add some personality into them!
First email:
Start with a strong subject line that tells them an action is required. My subject line of email #1 was: Still Wanna Get Blogging Tips from Me? (Action Required!).
Within the email, let them know the following:
- It seems they haven’t been reading your emails lately.
- You want to make sure you’re not clogging up their inbox if they’re not interested in your content any longer.
- You’re cleaning up to remove subscribers who don’t want to learn about ___ anymore (insert what your main topic there).
- If they want to continue receiving your emails, click here. (link to that Thank You page you made earlier)
- If they don’t want to get emails anymore, just click the unsubscribe link. In ConvertKit, use {{ unsubscribe_url }} within your email and it will auto-fill it with the unsubscribe link so they don’t have to scroll to the bottom.
- Let them know if they don’t select one of those two options, you’ll be reminded them one more time just to be absolutely sure you don’t remove anyone who’s still interested.
Second email:
For this one, share the date you’ll clean your list in the subject line. Mine stated: Urgent Action Required by 5/24 to continue receiving my emails.
This email is shorter, but it goes something like this:
- Remind them that a couple of days ago you emailed them because your email system flagged them as not opening your emails.
- On [date], you’re removing them from the list because you don’t want to keep sending them emails if they aren’t interested. Our inboxes are full enough! (I give them about 2 more days so they don’t forget.)
- Let them know if there’s been a mistake and they want to stay on the list, then they just need to click the link. (again, use the link to your Thank You page)
- If they want to unsubscribe, then no hard feelings. They won’t hear from you again.
8. Send emails 2-3 days apart.
As I mentioned before, send these 2-3 days apart at most. You don’t want to drag this out! I schedule mine during the week and not on the weekends.
When you send the second email, make sure that you exclude those who “warmed up” from getting the email again! To do that in ConvertKit, adjust your Recipients to exclude those with the Warm & Toasty tag.
Remove Your True Cold Subscribers
9. Delete the True Cold Subscribers with Email Segmenting.
Once you’ve run your little re-engagement campaign, it’s time to delete those truly inactive subscribers from your list. Since those who re-engaged are now Warm and Toasty, you need to make sure you don’t delete them!
Create a NEW segment called “Delete,” then use the same filtering as you did for the second re-engagement email. This ensures you’re only deleting those who never clicked the Warm & Toasty email in either re-engagement email.
After you create the segment, click the Select All xxx Subscribers link, then select Bulk Actions > Delete.
It’ll bring up another prompt just to be sure! Yeah, you’re sure.
(If you’re really NOT sure, then select “Export” from the Bulk Actions first so you have their info.)
10. Celebrate!
Yes, you should feel GOOD about trimming away the unengaged subscribers. They won’t help you grow your business, that’s for sure!
If you wanna know how MY first re-engagement campaign went, then here you go:
My Results:
First Re-Engagement Email
Out of over 2,500 people that received this email, only 129 people took action. Of those, 96 people (about 75%) clicked to stay subscribed and 33 people unsubscribed outright.
I even had someone email me who had unsubscribed just to say she enjoyed my content and was trying to start a blog, but ended up pursuing higher education instead. See, not everyone is unsubscribing because they’re sick of you!
Second Re-Engagement Email
I had even less success on my second email. Just 51 clicks out of 2,349 peeps.
It made me glad I didn’t waste time on writing three emails!
Overall Result of Campaign
Overall, only about 6% of people listed “cold” actually decided to stay subscribed.
In fact, when I moved over to ConvertKit a few years ago, I tagged a group of people “Original Email List.” That was a list of about 1,500 and it’s slowly dwindled to a little over 1,100 by the time I ran this re-engagement campaign. How many are now left? Just a little under 600 of them! Some of these subscribers have been with me for up to seven years – talk about loyal! (Thanks if you’re one of them.)
Open Rate Improvement Results
As for my open rates AFTER removing the cold subscribers?
My open rates before the campaign ranged from about 21-29%.
After, they’re around 26-36%! While that doesn’t sound drastic, it means more ENGAGED people. And I’m happy with that!
Finally, How Often Should You Delete Cold Subscribers?
Well, I’ll be honest and this was the first time I’ve done it since I’ve been on ConvertKit. I now plan to do this once every 3-6 months.
I mean, if you subscribed to my emails and haven’t opened one three months later, then you probably aren’t too interested in my content.
If You Want to Send a Campaign to Cold Subscribers with Other Providers
I don’t profess to know all the ins and out of doing this on other platforms since I don’t use them. But I tried to find you the best tutorials I could!
Pair the tutorial with a re-engagement steps and you’ll have a cleaner list (and higher open rates) in no time!
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