Email lists cost money to keep, so it makes sense to clean them up every now and then.

What’s the best way to do this?

When should you give up on a subscriber and stop emailing them?

Naturally there isn’t a correct answer to this.

A lot depends on the amount of money you could potentially get from a subscriber if they move from sitting on the fence to becoming a buyer.

If you’ve ever used direct mail, you’ll be aware of this as the cost of mailing is relatively high, so it’s a factor that near enough all direct mailers watch like a hawk.

But since the marginal cost of sending an email is almost zero – there’s only really the monthly cost of the extra band of subscribers in your autoresponder – it’s easy to get complacent.

There’s also an ego “thing” involved.

It’s much more satisfying to say that you have a larger number of subscribers – it’s kind of a bragging right.

Whereas the real thing you should be watching is what those subscribers do.

You know from your own email inbox that it’s much more effort to unsubscribe from an email list than it is to delete or ignore unwanted emails.

The same goes for your subscribers.

They are much more likely to delete your emails than they are to go through the hassle of clicking the unsubscribe link and then usually confirming their unsubscribe with another button click.

Even worse are the systems that ask you to confirm your email address – that’s what computers are for!

They’re perfectly capable of knowing who’s clicked the unsubscribe link and in my view that’s just poor list management. In those cases, I do go to extra effort. But only to click the “spam” box in my email program so that the errant email gets filtered away and the unhelpful person emailing me doesn’t get a reduction in the number of subscribers.

My guess is that I’m not alone in taking that view.

So if you use an autoresponder company that operates that policy, you should either change supplier or take a much more active role in managing your subscribers.

How you determine who to remove from your email lists will depend on how you monitor them.

I start a new list in Aweberfor each new product so it’s relatively easy for me to scrub people who haven’t bought in a certain amount of time.

But if you don’t launch products as regularly as I do, you’ll need to find another way to weed out the non-responders.

It’s often suggested that you should remove the people who don’t “open” your emails but that depends on how and where they read their emails and whether or not the small tracking pixel gets downloaded when they read your email.

That’s certainly not a perfect system so if you use it, you need to be careful that you don’t throw away people who are responding or at least reading your emails but not triggering the “open” pixel.

I’ve got no easy answer for that apart from maybe creating a new list for buyers every now and then. Or at least offering a free gift and asking them to confirm their email in some way – you could then use the automated unsubscribe option in your email control panel to control how this was handled.

If you’d like to know more about getting the most from your email list, check this out.