Photo by Scot Sandars

Here’s a great discussion among friends. A few top marketers have suggested we purge our email lists of people who never clicked on our email links over a certain time frame e.g. 3 months, 6 months, a year etc. The thinking is, they aren’t interested anyhow and are just taking up ‘space’.

If your list is small and you still have a long ways to go to hit the next level on your account, I’d not bother but if your account is at or running close to the limit, then it makes good sense because it has a direct impact on how much you pay your email service provider like Aweber. I know I cleaned out all our unsubscribes because they pushed us over the limit. In other words they were costing us. We are still close to the limit which means I’m seriously considering this as well.

For me, the reasons are not just about cost. I feel people who don’t take action or who aren’t interested enough in what I have to share even once a year, bring my averages down. Besides, if you aren’t interested in what I have to share, you’re more likely to be unhappy with me the next time I promote something and I don’t want anyone unhappy with us.

Where to make the cut

Anyhow the next question if you do this, how do you slice the deck?

You have to be careful here. If possible, I’d choose to purge those who have not clicked, not those who haven’t opened your emails.

Reason is, open rates are a horrible statistic. If you never send HTML email you’d never have open rate stats anyhow. If you do, open rates is not a good indicator because people may be reading but never get registered as an open. For example, I use Gmail and GoogleApps exclusively. These are by default set not to display graphics – that’s how open rates are measured by the way even if you don’t put any of your own graphics in it, but Aweber does.

So… technically all your Gmail people would count as unopened even if they are reading your emails. Unless they specifically click the link that says display all graphics. Don’t know about others but I hardly ever click that unless the email is entirely made up of graphics and forces me to do – dislike!.

Another thing, I also always read emails on the phone or iPad. These two also do not display graphics by default. Yet, I open and click emails a lot. If someone were to use the unopened criteria, I’d be axed for sure and that’s not good because I do buy – a lot as a result of emails.

Me thinks, if you do purge, make sure you purge based on the right metric.

Questions for you

Here’s my question to you. Do you purge your lists? If yes, based on what criteria and how often do you do it? Have you found your list to be more responsive after?