When was the last time you did a spring clean or a purge on your email list?

If you haven't there are a whole ton of reasons why you should be doing this. It won't even take that long to do and can save you some time and money in the long run.

There is no point having someone on your email list if they don't read your emails. The chances are that they are not going to buy what you are selling and to add insult to injury you are paying for them to be on your list. Its makes sense to delete people that are not engaging with you especially if you are paying for them to be there?

There is no point having a massive list if people are not buying, personally I would rather have a really small responsive list of 100 rather than an unresponsive list of 1000.  Also don't forget you are responsible for your own list and wouldn't want your emails to bee seen as being spammy.

So here is what I would do.

You can use Aweber to find out who is not reading your emails by using some of their filtering tools

Send these people a final broadcast email telling them they have to take some sort of action in order to keep getting your emails.

This will re-op-tin them again to a new list.

From there you can then delete all of your non reading people from your original list.

The benefits of this will be as follows

• It will lower your email provider costs saving you money
• It will increase your open rates
• It will make your list more responsive (including the ones who were previously unresponsive)
• It will make your emails less likely to be marked as spam because the people who are receiving them truly want to.
• This will improve your email reputation and as a result your email deliver-ability will go up making it less likely that your emails will end up in the spam folders.
• This is a win win situation for everyone involved.

Get on it today and also don't forget to check out the added bits below.

Also make sure that you delete the unsubscribed emails from your lists because you are also paying for them even though you are getting no benefit from them. At least this is this case if you are using Aweber as your email provider.
You should also delete any emails that bounce and any emails that have prefixes such as sales@ info@ (unless this is your target market of course)

If you are using Mail Chimp and want to switch to another provider then you can use this changeover as a great opportunity to get your list cleaned up and improve on your deliver-ability as well.