How do I tidy my mailing list once a year?
A mailing list is not a trophy. The number of subscribers matters far less than what happens to the email you send them, and a list that quietly fills up with people you never reach works against you. Once a year is about the right rhythm to look at it.
The prompt
“Show me the quiet contacts for [my site] and explain who they are and what happens if I stop emailing them.”
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What bernard shows you
Under Your customers, on the Email campaigns tab, a Quiet contacts section lists the people who have gone a full twelve months with nothing at all: no order and no form filled in, and then no sign of life in your email either. It only appears once twenty or more people qualify, because a prompt about three people is noise.
Three things about that list are worth being precise about.
It only ever contains people you are allowed to email. If you imported eight hundred names from a spreadsheet and never got permission for them, they are not here. They were never being emailed, so there is nothing to stop. When do I need someone’s permission to email them? explains how somebody joins your audience in the first place.
Two different rules decide who is quiet, and the section says which applied. For somebody who agreed to opens and clicks being recorded, bernard judges them on that: quiet means they opened nothing and clicked nothing all year, however often you wrote to them. For everybody else bernard knows nothing about reading, so quiet means only that no campaign reached their mailbox in a year. A short line under the heading gives you the split in your own numbers, because “these people are not reading me” is a fair thing to say about the first group and a claim nobody can stand behind about the second. Can I see who opened my email? covers how somebody comes to be in the first group, and Has this person opened anything I sent? is how you look one of them up.
An uncertain open still counts as a sign of life. If bernard saw any open or click at all in the year, including one a mail app fetched on its own, that person is not quiet and is deliberately missing from the list. Bernard would rather leave somebody on your list than stop emailing a reader on the strength of a record it is unsure about.
Bernard stops counting at five hundred, so a very large list says “500 or more contacts have been quiet for over a year” rather than a precise figure. Five hundred is also as many as one pass can stop, and there is nothing you would do differently at seven hundred, so it does not spend the time working the exact number out.
Stopping the ones you no longer want to email
Choose Stop emailing these. Bernard shows you a quote first: the exact number of addresses, what will happen to them, and what will not. You say yes once.
If your list changed while you were reading the quote, bernard blocks nothing and shows you the new number instead. That is deliberate. A yes belongs to a number you actually read.
One pass stops at most five hundred addresses. If there are more, the quote says so and you run it again afterwards for the rest.
Nothing is deleted and no email goes out. The addresses join your do-not-email list marked as blocked by you, which is the one reason on that list you can undo yourself. Their orders, their course access and everything they ever told you stay exactly where they are. Who is on my do-not-email list, and why? covers the whole list and what each reason means.
Very large lists are tidied in more than one pass; the quote says so when that applies, and you simply run it again.
Before you press it
There is no rush, and there is a good reason to slow down. If you have not sent anything in a year yourself, the quiet is yours rather than theirs, and blocking people because you did not write to them is the wrong fix. Send something first, see who is still there, and tidy afterwards.
The same goes for a seasonal business. Somebody who books one workshop every eighteen months is not stale, they are seasonal, and the twelve-month line will catch them. Read the list before you act on the number.
What it does for your newsletter
Is my email sending healthy? shows the two numbers that decide how your email is treated: how much of it fails to arrive, and how many people mark it as spam. Both get worse as a list ages, because old addresses get closed and reused, and because people who have forgotten you are the most likely to hit the spam button rather than unsubscribe.
Tidying once a year is the cheapest thing you can do to protect the people who do want to hear from you.
Doing it every night instead
This tidy stays a list you read and act on yourself. If you want bernard to stop emailing people who never open, every night, there is a separate rule you can switch on. It only judges people who agreed to their opens and clicks being recorded: Stop emailing people who never open my emails.
Questions people ask
- Where do I find this?
- Open Your customers, then the Email campaigns tab. The Quiet contacts section appears under your do-not-email list, and only when twenty or more people are on it. Below that number there is nothing worth tidying and bernard leaves you alone.
- Who counts as quiet?
- Someone you are allowed to email who has not ordered anything and not filled in one of your forms for over twelve months, and who then meets one of two rules. Somebody who agreed to opens and clicks being recorded has to have opened nothing and clicked nothing in that year. Everybody else has to have had no campaign reach them in that year. People you were never allowed to email are never in this list, because stopping emails you were never sending changes nothing.
- Does this mean they are not reading me?
- For some of them, and the section says how many. Anyone who agreed to opens and clicks being recorded is judged on those, so for that group it really does mean nothing was opened or clicked in a year. For everybody else bernard knows nothing about reading and the honest claim is only that you have not reached them. It says the split in your own numbers rather than making the stronger claim about all of them.
- Somebody agreed and I know their mail app fetches everything. Are they in the list?
- No. If bernard saw any open or click at all in the year, including one a mail app fetched, that person is not quiet. That is deliberate: an uncertain open is treated as a sign of life rather than as an excuse to stop emailing somebody who is still reading.
- Does it delete anybody?
- No. Nothing is deleted and no email is sent. The addresses go on your do-not-email list marked as blocked by you, so their orders, course access and history all stay exactly where they are.
- Can I change my mind?
- Yes. This is your own block, and your own block is the one kind you can undo yourself. Open the Do not email section, find the address and choose Undo.
- Does bernard do this on its own?
- Not this tidy. Bernard shows you the list and the exact number, and nothing happens until you approve it. Asking Bernard in the Workshop is the same: it can read the list for you, but the approval is yours and the one-step block lives on the page. Separately, you can switch on a nightly rule that stops emailing people who never open; it is off until you approve it. Sending a campaign still needs your own approval as usual.
- Why does it matter at all?
- Mail services judge your sending by what happens to it. A list full of addresses that never do anything slowly lowers how your newsletter is treated, so the people who do want to hear from you are more likely to end up in a spam folder.