In which the question of the hour is asked:
“In your experience, what are the best ways to weed out non-buyers? I sometimes delete readers who haven’t bought anything for over five years and only ask questions by email. One of the most important things I learned from you was the quality of the list, not its size. That’s why I only focus on growing the buyer list, not the reader list. I would be interested in your best practices on how to weed out non-buyers via the daily email, so to speak.”
Here are my thoughts on it:
* Do not whole cloth delete the non-buyers
* After all, you never know when they will become buyers
* The people replying are great to keep on your list for fodder (questions, trolls, ideas)
* They are also great to keep on your list because Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc see them replying to you and see you are a real person, and that can potentially help your inbox deliverability – if anything, you should want more of them
* If you want a clean list I suggest scrubbing your list
* When scrubbing your list remove the bots and catch-all addresses “help@“ or “admin@“, “swipe@” and all the other ones probably nobody is checking or engaging with
I will also say this:
This has been coming up more and more and more over the past year or so. Probably even longer, for all I know. So until proven otherwise I will just assume someone is prancing around a mastermind room somewhere teaching people to delete everyone who hasn’t opened, bought, or engaged in 30 or 90 days or whatever. I will also assume until proven otherwise it’s something people who have no clue how the long game of email or direct marketing actually works teach to others who have even less of a clue — and how unreliable tracking opens at all is in the first place.
Of course, some dork on social media will now probably say:
“Ben says not to track!”
No, Maynard.
What I am saying is that a lot of email tracking is unreliable.
Useful?
Yes, especially when looking at trends over time.
Profitable?
Of course, if you use it right.
We even have tracking and automation mechanisms (designed by my biz partner Troy Broussard — an actual scientist, who gets how for real scientific testing works from being both a Navy Nuclear Engineer and from when he was the Executive Director of Technology for Encyclopedia Brittanica running a $12 million department of developers… not to mention when he was doing all the test/tracking/automation for as many as 50 million emails per month as a consultant) baked in BerserkerMail, after all. But if you think all the major email clients from Gmail to Yahoo to Hotmail to Protonmail to Apple’s Mail and everyone in between are not making it harder — and certainly not easier — to track, by design, to protect their users from you… then, well, I don’t know what to tell you.
Go ahead and delete your whole list for all I care.
Because if you keep deleting people whole cloth you’ll get the same results either way.
My opinion.
It’s also been my experience, too, for over 20 years.
When you send emails people want to read that sell offers people want, you start seeing how many people are buying without being tracked, are not shown as opening or clicking anything yet you still see them buying… and in some cases are maybe not even on your list at all — as someone who is on your list who is also not being tracked by today’s flawed tracking software told them about you, they found you, bought, and the list goes on.
That’ll do it for today.
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Ben Settle
