What do to do with the ones never opening a newsletter

There is this thread on best practises in removing unsubscribed members.

I have not figured out if they can also choose to revoke their membership when they unsubscribe or not. But I’d like to know what other people do with people [read members] that obviously never ever opened a newsletter?

I can see one unsubscribe from a newsletter but visit a site. But the other way around. Be a member of a site but never open a newsletter, does one really need to be a member then?

My members are imported from another platform, where I started my site, and there were a few already there that never seemed to open any kind of news coming out from the site.

What does one do with those subscribers?

Keep them, and if so why?

Remove them, and if so, why?

If anybody have any kind of input please feel free to share :slight_smile:

I’m slowly dealing with this at the moment. I imported ~3500 from my WP site, knowing that a significant proportion were effectively inactive. After a few months, I screened the lists to find imports that had never opened any newsletters. I unsubscribed about 700, but left them as members (but gave them a new label). I’ve been back to this list more recently - some have re-subscribed, others have signed-in but remain unsubscribed from the newsletter, one or two have even become paying subscribers :grinning:.

On MagicPages there’s a generous monthly email allowance and fees are not member-based. I’m therefore encouraged to be generous in retaining members, whether they receive the newsletter or not, or whether they open it or not. Other hosting companies have different fee structures, which would influence my choice.

If I look at open rates of current recipients (~4000), less than 4% have opened fewer than 10% of the newsletters. However, it’s clear that some use RSS readers, some sign-in periodically, or pick up new posts from social media. 5% of this 4% (keeping up?!) are paying subscribers.

My current strategy is to unsubscribe the terminally inactive after 6 months, give them another 6 months and those that clearly are ‘in the wind’ will get deleted.

Finally, my site is about a ‘seasonal’ activity, with interest waxing and waning through the year. April to September see about 75% of sign-ups and page access. It’s therefore not unusual to have someone very engaged over the summer, but who never reads anything sent them for the rest of the year … and this includes those who pay. Another reason to be generous in retaining subscribers …

Great inputs, on my now dormant photo business I did remove subscribers on a regular basis, Cause if they never opened their news letters I did not see any reason to why I would risk my news letter quota because of them.

Now when being on Ghost I am running a complete other project set up. The site is built around people reading articles. So that is what makes me hesitate, and also wonder what to do with the ones that never open any newsletters.

What I do see, there are some people that never opened any newsletters sent from my original site [Substack] that now have been opening them so that is good news.

Some of the Substackers signed off from the newsletter, but since they did some of those have been active on the new site. So based on this your kind of waiting game really make sense :smiley:

Worth noting that newsletter opens are not 100% reliable. Some email clients block open tracking, for privacy. (Other users have spam protection that effectively clicks links, so you’ve got users marked wrong in both directions.)

I’d be hesitant to unsubscribe and delete without a “hey, are you still reading?” message, as a result.

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Yeah, I find it very difficult.

With the photo business it was kind of no worries to remove the ones that seemed to not care about our news, sales pitches, discounts etc. which was what we were sending via what ever service we were using, even though I believe it was campaign monitor. If they wanted photos they would buy them anyway.

But now when it is more of a magazine it feels more tricky to figure out what [if needed] to do with the ones that seem not interested :smile: