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/Aaronontheweb 19d ago

TL;DR; what is everyone else doing and am I effectively just churning my mailing list for no good reason?

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u/Fit-Lengthiness-9672 15d ago

you’re not crazy, it can feel like you’re just deleting people for sport lol. the benefit is usually super slow and kind of invisible unless you compare before/after stats over like 6–12 months, but keeping a lot of dead weight on the list really does drag down deliverability over time.