How to Clean Your Email List and Win Back Dead Subscribers

0:00Here's a question that most e-commerce brand owners don't want to answer honestly. So, when did you last look at what percentage of your email list is actually opening your emails? Cuz most ecom brands I talked to are sitting on a list of 30, 50, sometimes 100,000 email subscribers. And when you dig into the numbers, maybe 15 to 20% of those people are actually engaged. The rest haven't opened an email in months and some have never opened anything at all. And here's the part that stinks. You are paying Clavio for every single one of those contacts. So, you're sending to all of them. And by doing that, you're actively

0:41damaging your ability to reach the people who actually do want to hear from you. So, in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what to do about it. Not just how to clean your list, but how to try to save subscribers worth saving before you let them go. So stay with me because there's a specific order to do this that most eco brands get completely backwards. And getting it wrong means

1:06losing revenue you didn't have to lose. So my name is Emil and I run Magicianly, which is an email and SMS marketing agency for e-commerce brands. And we've been doing this for over 7 years now. And we've worked with more than 120 e-commerce brands all over the world. And we've generated them over $300 million in attributed revenue. Plus, we also have more than 30-star reviews on our Trust Pilot page. And one of the first things that we do when we take on

1:34a new client is audit their list health. And almost every single time, the same picture emerges. So a bloated list, weak engagement signals, and deliverability. that's quietly getting worse month after month. So fixing this is one of the fastest ways to improve email performance. And it starts with understanding why unengaged subscribers are not just useless because they're

1:58actively working against you right now. Most brand owners think of their email list like a bank account. So more subscribers equals more money. So the idea of removing tens of thousands of contacts feels terrifying, like you're destroying something valuable. But here's how the inbox providers actually see it. So, Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook are not just passive pipes that just forward your emails. They're actively grading you every single time that you send an email to an email subscribe. And the grade that they give you is based almost entirely on how your recipients respond to your emails. So, simply, are they opening your emails? Are they clicking inside your emails? Are they

2:37replying to your emails? or are they ignoring your emails, deleting them without opening, or even worse, marking you as spam. So, every time that you send to a large chunk of unengaged email subscribers, you're sending a signal to Gmail that says, "Hey, a lot of the people who receive this brand's emails don't want them." And Gmail responds by making it harder for your emails to reach even the people who do want to receive your emails. So also your engaged subscribers start seeing you in the promotions tab instead of the primary inbox. So your open rates will drop, your click rates will drop and the whole system gets worse over time. And

3:13there's also a direct financial cost because Clavio charges you based on the numbers of active profiles in your account. So, if you have 60,000 subscribers and 45,000 of them haven't engaged in 6 months, you're simply paying for 45,000 contacts that are generating zero revenue and actively hurting your email deliverability. And that is why list hygiene is not just a nice to have, but it's a core part of running a profitable email program. But before you start suppressing people, there's an important step that most ecom brands skip out on. And skipping it costs real money. So before we get into that, I just want to mention that I have

3:54a free email marketing course on my website that goes much deeper into all of these email systems. It's completely free. There's no fluff. The link is in the description below if you want to download it. So right now, let's continue with this video. So here's the mistake I see all the time. A brand decides to clean their list. They go into the Claio account and start suppressing everyone who hasn't opened in 90 days. So gone, deleted, done. And yeah, your email deliverability will improve, but you also just threw away a significant amount of people who could have been recovered with the right sequence. Because not every ungayed

4:31subscriber is a lost cause. Some of them went quiet because your content got boring, and some of them got simply busy, and some of them just needed the right offer at the right moment. And a properly built re-engagement sequence will always pull back a percentage of those people before you let them go. So the way to think about this is in two distinct groups. So the first group is lapsed customers. So these are people who bought from you once and then they just stopped engaging. So these are not just called email subscribers. These are the people who already trusted you enough to hand them over their money. So

5:07that makes them significantly more valuable than someone who only ever signed up for a discount and never bought anything from your brand. So for this first group, you have a dedicated flow which we call the customer win back flow. And it triggers automatically when a customer exceeds their expected repurchase window without buying again. So you want to start this flow with a reconnection email. So no discount, just

5:31a reason to come back to your store. Then after that, in the next emails, you want to introduce your best offer and you want to end with a personal plain text note from the founder as a final notch. By the way, I have a full tutorial on how to create a high converting customer flow on this channel and I'll make sure to put a link in the description below if you want to check it out. But the strategic point here is that you should always attempt to win back laps customers before suppressing them because yeah they converted once and with the right message at the right

5:59time a meaningful percentage of them will convert again. The second group is called email subscribers who never bought for you and these are people who signed up maybe engaged briefly and then they went quiet. So for this group you run what's called a sunset unengage flow. So, a sunset flow is your last attempt to re-engage a cold subscriber before you remove them from your email list. So, this is not a sales sequence

6:24to be honest. It's not a discount blast. It's just a final check-in that essentially asks them like, "Hey, do you still want to be here?" And the structure of this flow is simple. It's just a single plain text email where you simply ask them, "Hey, do you still want to receive our emails or not?" And you also want to give them the option to change the preferences in the preference center so they can select what kind of emails they still want to receive from your site because some people only want to receive discounted emails from you while others only want the educational content. And if they still don't engage

6:56with you after that email, you tag them. You make a segment of people with that unengaged tag and then you can suppress them. So no guilt, no second guessing. They had multiple opportunities to re-engage with you and they didn't. So removing them is the right decision for your email deliverability and to save cost on your cla bill. One important thing to get right with the sunset flow is the trigger. So you want to run this before you hit the point of serious deliverability damage. So, if someone hasn't opened in 90 to 120 days and has received enough emails to have a real chance to engage with you, there's a

7:29reasonable window to trigger the sunset. And you don't want to wait until 180 days because by then the damage to your sender reputation has been accumulating for months. So, once your wimbeck flow and sunset flow have run their course, it's time to do the actual list cleaning. And this is more specific than most people think because there are five categories of contacts that you want to suppress and each one requires its own segment inside Claia. The first one is unengaged subscribers from the last 180 days. So these are people who received at least 5 to 10 emails from you in the past 180 days, but they haven't opened a

8:08single one of them. They haven't clicked in the emails. They have not been active on your website. And of course, they also not have placed an order for you in the last, let's say, at least year. So these are contacts that are basically that weight. You want to suppress them. Second is people who are added to your email list at least a year ago, but they never actually receive an email from you. And for a lot of eco brands, this seems to be a pretty large portion of their email list because these tend to be contacts that ended up in Calio through integrations or imports, but

8:38were never properly added to a sending list. So, they're taking up space on your bill and providing zero value for you. The third segment is people who have never opened a single email ever despite being on your list for over a year. Again, there's no engagement history at all. So, you just want to suppress them. The fourth segment, and this is a critical one, is anyone who has ever marked your emails as spam because spam complaints are one of the most damaging signals you can send to inbox providers like Gmail. Gmail's

9:08threshold for complaint rates is.1%. So even a small number of spam complaints can significantly hurt your email deliverability. So these contacts need to be suppressed immediately and not eventually. And the fifth segment is bounced email addresses. So we have hard bounces and soft bounces. Hard bounces where the email address doesn't exist anymore is or is permanently rejected your message should be suppressed after a single occurrence. Soft bounces on the other hand which are temporary delivery failures should be suppressed after four or more occurrences. So when you build these segments in Clavio and you start suppressing them the number of people in these segments can feel shocking at

9:49first. So an email list that had 80,000 contacts before can become 30,000 and that's a completely normal and healthy outcome. So what you're left with is an audience that actually wants to hear from you and that's the only audience worth sending to. And keep in mind that cleaning your email list is not a

10:06one-time task. It's an ongoing practice. [music] And once you've done the initial clean, the goal is to maintain that health going forward. So you never have to do a massive purchase once again. So the most important ongoing habit is to only send campaigns to engaged segments. So in Claio, that means building segments based on recent opens, clicks,

10:26sign activity, and purchase behavior. And making sure that you only send campaigns to those segments rather than your full list. And we cover this in depth in my email deliverability tutorial on my channel. But the core principle is simple. You want to protect your sender reputation and never send to people who aren't engaging. The second habit is to run your sunset flow automatically as a permanent part of your Clavio setup. So you don't want to manually identify cold subscribers every few months. You want to have a flow that runs in the background and catches

10:58people as they drift into inactivity. And then of course you want to give them the chance to re-engage. But if they don't then you want to suppress them automatically if they don't. So the third habit is to check your deliverability metrics regularly. And we use a tool called clock apps for that. And clock apps shows you exactly what percentage of your emails are landing in the primary inbox, the promotions folder and the spam folder across Google, Yahoo, and Outlook. So, if your primary placement starts to slip, that's an early warning sign that your list health

11:28or content quality needs your attention. So, you want to catch it early and then you can quickly fix it. Cuz if you let it go for months, then you're looking at a much longer recovery process. I want to finish this video by talking about something that doesn't get mentioned enough, which is what actually happens to your business after you clean your list. The financial impact is immediate and real because Claio's pricing is

11:50based on your active profile account. So, if you go from 80,000 email subscribers to 30,000, you're looking at a significant reduction in your monthly claim you will, and that's hundreds of dollars a month that you're now saving. And because your engagement rates go up after cleaning your list, your revenue per email typically increases as well. So, you're spending less and you're making more percent. And the deliverability impact compounds over time. So, a cleaner email list means higher engagement rates, which means better inbox placement, which means more of your emails reach the people who want to read them. And that's simply a flywheel. Every improvement in list

12:27quality leads to better email deliverability, which leads to better operates, which leads to better revenue, which gives you more data to optimize with. And there's a psychological shift that happens, too. Because when you're managing a bloated email list and you're seeing 50% open rates, email marketing can feel discouraging. But when you clean that list and suddenly you see 50% operates on your campaigns, the whole email channel feels different. You start to see email as the asset, it actually is and not just a liability that you're managing. So the brands that treat your email list like a quality asset, adding carefully, nurturing consistently, and removing ruthlessly when engagement

13:06dies, those brands are the ones that get compounding returns from email marketing over time. And the brands that hoard subscribers because big numbers feel good. Those are the ones who wonder why email never quite delivers for them. So here's the process in order. Before you suppress anyone, run your customer win back flow for lapsed customers and your sunset flow for cold subscribers. Give people a real chance to re-engage with you. Then you want to clean your list

13:32using the five segments that we covered. Then you want to set up the systems to maintain that list health going forward so you never have to do a massive cleanup again. A clean engaged email list is not a smaller email program. It's a better one. better email deliverability, better operates, better revenue percent, and a lower claio bill on top of it. Now, once your email list is clean and your email deliverability is strong, the next question is what to do with all those re-engaged email subscribers and active buyers? Because getting them back is one thing, but

14:04keeping them buying is another thing. So, if you want my team to build and manage the full email and SMS system for your brand, so things like your flows, your campaigns, your list growth, segmentation, deliverability, all of it. Check out the first link in the description below and book a free call with me. During this call, we will look at what you currently have. We'll find the biggest gaps and opportunities for your brand, and we'll show you exactly what's possible for your brand. And right after this, go watch my next video where I break down the easiest ways to get customers to buy more from your

14:38brand. Because once your list is healthy, the highest leverage thing you can do is build the systems that turn want buyers into loyal repeat customers for your store. And you want to do this without relying on discounts every single time. So, I'll see you over