In today’s podcast I am sharing with you our recent experience with cutting down our email list. We all know how critical it is to build up your lists, but how about doing a clean sweep of them? This recent adventure was inspired by a session that Paul Jarvis did on our Lift Off Summit. Listen to learn why and how we chopped our site by over half.

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Transcript

You can also download a pdf of the full transcript here: WordPress eCommerce Show Episode 85 June 21 2017

Bob Dunn: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the WP eCommerce Show. Bob Dunn here, also known as BobWP on the web. On today’s show I am flying solo instead of the having a guest, and there’s a good reason for this. I had thought of doing a post instead but the fact that building your email list is so critical to eCommerce sites, I thought I would share my story with you today. The fact that I have recently eliminated half of my email list may raise some eyebrows. But here’s what happened.

I was editing some videos for our recent Lift Off Summit and listened to the first few minutes of the email marketing presentation by Paul Jarvis. And his simple insights at the beginning piqued my interest. He essentially said that he is more than happy to remove people from his lis—for a few reasons which I will get into in a bit. He also threw out the term vanity numbers. What he meant by this was that some people, whether it’s to impress or feel good about themselves, boast on their sites about the number they have on their mailing lists. 

For example, on a couple sign-up areas of blogs in the WordPress space I saw this recently.

Join more than 7,500 readers.

Join 30,000 happy subscribers.

Now there are sites where this number is even larger. But I got to thinking. 7,500 readers? Are they all really readers? What about 30,000 subscribers? Fair enough, they are probably subscribers. To explain where I’m heading with this, let me give you a bit of history on our site.

Over the last 2-3 years we have done some transitions. Adding podcasts, changing the focus of our site to to be more around eCommerce. Moving away from the WordPress basics. Sure, we have a ton of content in our archives that still drives a lot of beginners to our site, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. Because of our changes, and the change in content, our audience has also changed. And since the change, I have seen subscribers staying pretty even with subscribes and unsubscribes.

Before you start, decide the purpose of your email list.

But here’s the deal about our email list. In the past, I cultivated different sub-sets of audiences through a variety of strategies. We have sent out a newsletter with content only available through the email. Other times, people received an ebook for subscribing. Now, of course, people subscribe specifically to get updates to the blog. So, as you can guess, it’s not a high priority in the sense of building a huge list as we are not upselling or trying to drive people through a sales funnel. It’s simply an update on the blog.

Now if and when we change this at some point, that is an entirely different conversation. But let’s talk about those numbers and how I went about removing half of our subscribers. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, Paul Jarvis had some good insights into his strategy. In a nutshell, it was about getting rid of the dead wood in his list. And since our list was generated over some serious time,