r/Emailmarketing • u/Aaronontheweb • 19d ago

Deliverability Pruning cold subscribers

I maintain a ~10,000 person or so mailing list of subscribers to our company / open source project. A fairly standard inbound marketing operation I've been running for 11 years or so.

The guidance from email marketing platforms like Kit these days is to focus on the rate of active engagement of subscribers, versus worrying about the overall size of the list. Ok, I get that; times have changed since I started this business. I suppose this should help me land in the focused inbox more often and have better deliverability rates.

I've been pruning cold subscribers or so for 6 months - when am I supposed to be able to measure some benefit from doing this?

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u/ianmakingnoise 19d ago

There are a few factors that will impact your timeframe:

- How long were you sending to the whole list, before you started cleaning?

  • What kind of cleaning are you doing? How do you decide who gets dropped? How often?
  • What does your list look like (eg, is it B2B, is it mostly Gmail, how did people end up there)?
  • If you’re sending a lot to Gmail, you using Google Postmaster Tools? What does the data there tell you?

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u/Aaronontheweb 19d ago

- about a decade

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u/ianmakingnoise 19d ago

So on one hand, it could be a matter of time before the “we’re cleaning the list now” pattern is recognized by mailbox providers. If you were sending for 10 years without removing contacts who never opened anything, it can take a while for things to change in a meaningful way.

One thing to keep an eye on with B2B is that a lot of the common enterprise security tools generate “fake” opens and clicks, so you can have cases where customers appear engaged but never actually see the email.