Latest / The Email Marketing Podcast with Fexingo: Newsletters, Open Rates, and Subscriber Growth / Why Dormant Subscribers Kill Your Email Metrics
Transcript
- Lucas: So let me start with a number that might make you uncomfortable. The average email list across industries has about 40 to 60 percent of subscribers who haven't opened an email in the last 90 days. Luna: Wow. That's more than half the list doing nothing. Lucas: Exactly. And here's the problem — those dormant subscribers are quietly ruining your metrics. They don't open, they don't click, but they still count toward your total list size. So your open rate denominator gets bigger while your numerator stays the same. Your open rate looks lower than it should, and your deliverability takes a hit. Luna: Wait — how does deliverability get hurt? Isn't it just about spam complaints and bounces? Lucas: Those matter, but internet service providers also look at engagement signals. If you keep sending to people who never open, ISPs start flagging your mail as low-priority. Some even route it to spam. The Sarbanes-Oxley era is over — today, the inbox is won or lost on engagement. Luna: So keeping dead weight on your list is actually making life harder for the people who do want your emails. Lucas: Exactly. And that brings me to a case study I think is really instructive. There's a mid-size B2B SaaS company — I won't name them, but they sell productivity software to small teams. Their list was about 80,000 subscribers early last year. They noticed their open rate had dropped from 28 percent to 19 percent over about eighteen months. Luna: That's a steep decline. What did they do? Lucas: They ran a re-engagement campaign first. They sent a three-email sequence over two weeks: 'Hey, we noticed you haven't been reading — want to stay?' The third email included a clear 'unsubscribe' link. About 12 percent of their dormant segment re-engaged. But 18 percent of the total list — roughly 14,400 subscribers — got removed either by unsubscribing or by the company's sunset policy after no response. Luna: That sounds like a lot of people to just cut loose. Lucas: It does. But the results were pretty compelling. Within 30 days, their open rate climbed to 34 percent. Their click-through rate jumped 34 percent — same number, but that's coincidental. And their spam complaint rate dropped by nearly half. Luna: So by losing 18 percent of their list, they made the remaining 82 percent actually perform better. Lucas: Right. And this is the key insight — list size is a vanity metric if the people on it aren't engaged. A smaller, active list is worth more than a big, bloated one. Luna: But how do you define dormant? Ninety days feels arbitrary. Some businesses have longer sales cycles. Lucas: Fair question. For B2B, some people use 180 days. For e-commerce, 60 days is common. The principle is the same — pick a window that aligns with your typical purchase cycle. The important thing is consistency. If you define dormant as 90 days, stick to it and run the cleanup quarterly. Luna: Let's talk about the re-engagement sequence itself. What works? Lucas: The best sequences I've seen have three components. First, remind them why they signed up — a value-add email, not just a 'please stay' message. Second, offer an incentive or a piece of content that's genuinely useful. Third, make the unsubscribe button prominent. You want people who don't want your emails to leave, because they're dragging down your metrics. Luna: That third point is counterintuitive. Most brands hide the unsubscribe link. Lucas: I know. But if someone doesn't want to hear from you, forcing them to stay is a lose-lose. They ignore your emails, which hurts deliverability. Or they mark you as spam, which hurts even more. A clean list is a healthy list. Luna: By the way — this episode is brought to you by our listeners. We don't run ads, and that's a deliberate choice. If today's episode was useful to you and you want to keep it ad-free, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo helps. Lucas: Yeah, it really does. A bunch of listeners chip in monthly, and that's what keeps these conversations going. Luna: Alright, back to dormant subscribers. You mentioned a sunset policy — what does that look like operationally? Lucas: A good sunset policy has clear triggers. For example, after 90 days of no opens, they go into a re-engagement segment. If they don't engage with the re-engagement sequence within another 30 days, they're automatically moved to a suppressed list. After that, maybe a final 'we're removing you' email, and then they're gone. Luna: Do you recommend removing them entirely, or keeping them in a separate suppressed list? Lucas: Suppressed list is safer, because sometimes they come back — maybe they switch jobs or change email addresses. You don't want to re-import them later as new subscribers. But for all practical sending purposes, they're removed. Luna: One thing I've wondered — does pruning dormant subscribers hurt your email authentication metrics? Like, if your list shrinks, do some tools flag that as suspicious? Lucas: That's a smart concern. But no — the opposite is true. Sending fewer emails to a more engaged list improves your sender reputation. ISPs like seeing high engagement rates. A sudden drop in list size from a cleanup is normal, and as long as you're not purging 50 percent overnight, it's fine. Luna: So gradual is better. Lucas: Exactly. Run it quarterly, remove a few thousand at a time. Your ESP will handle it. The real risk is doing nothing. Luna: Let's talk about the open rate itself. A lot of marketers still treat it as the gold standard metric. But if we clean our list, our open rate goes up — so is it even meaningful anymore? Lucas: I think open rate is still useful as a trend, but not as an absolute number. Your open rate after a cleanup might be 30 percent, but that doesn't mean your emails are better — it just means your denominator is healthier. That's why I prefer click-through rate and conversion rate. Those are harder to game. Luna: So the advice is: don't obsess over open rate. Obsess over engagement. Lucas: Yes. And recency is a huge part of engagement. If someone opened an email last week, they're much more likely to convert than someone who hasn't opened in six months. So segment by recency. Send your best content to your most recent openers. Luna: That's basically the RFM model — recency, frequency, monetary value — applied to email. Lucas: Exactly right. And if you do nothing else this quarter, run a recency-based segmentation and prune the bottom tier. Your deliverability will thank you, and your click-through rates will reflect real interest instead of noise. Luna: Alright, so next step for our listeners: if you haven't looked at your list in the last three months, go check how many subscribers haven't opened in 90 days. Lucas: And be ready for an uncomfortable number. But remember — that number is an opportunity. Act on it, and you'll build a list that actually wants to hear from you. Luna: That's a good place to leave it. Until next time.