Cleaning my Mail Chimp

My Mail Chimp list has been growing. This morning I opened it to send an e-mail and it says I have 222 people on my list. The problem is, I know that is not true.

Most of those people listed their first names and their last names for both their first name and last name. For example, an entry would say:

First name: Rachel Edmunds Last name: Rachel Edmunds.

Entry information for people I know in real life looks different.

First name: Rachel Last name: Edmunds.

I have a 30% open rate. When I did the math, I ended up with about as many people as I thought were real people and not robot sign ups.

If I am right, I have a lot more engagement happening with my newsletter than the stats say. My open rate is much, much higher.

At the beginning of January, I made sure I had enabled Robot deterrent features on my Mailchimp account. Then I gathered everyone whose name was listed like above and tagged them as Possible Spam.

I sent an email to everyone with the tag: Possible Spam. I let them know that I thought that they had been signed up via a robot and that if they really did want to be on my list, they should email me and I would keep them. Otherwise, I asked them to unsubscribe. I further told them that at the end of January, if they hadn’t contacted me, I would remove them from the list.

For the next few days after I sent the email, I got a lot of unsubscribes. So many, in fact, that mail chimp got concerned and their robots sent me an email about the amount of unsubscribes I was receiving suggesting that I was doing something wrong.

I knew I was doing something right.

Why do I want to limit my email list? I am looking for my 1000 true fans. That’s who I want on my email list: People who want to be there. I don’t think having a robot sign someone up for my email list is really going to make them into one of my true fans. I also have a hard time knowing if I am being effective. If I only have a 30% open rate, it feels like I’m not being effective. I can change how I interact, but it won’t change the open rate if 70% of the people on my email list didn’t remember signing up for my list. They are probably wondering how they got on my list or maybe they have abandoned that email because it is full of spam.

When I get a larger list, it is going to cost me to continue to host it on Mailchimp and I really only want to pay for people who want to be there.

So, today, I went through the list and archived anyone with a double name entry. My list shrank down to the number of fans I think I actually have. Now I can go write a newsletter and see if my true fans are engaging with what I write or not.

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