How to Clean Your Substack Email List the Right Way

Without removing your best subscribers by accident.

Photo by Sam Pak on Unsplash

Seeing those subscribers add up makes you feel successful.

But let’s be honest, not all of them will open your emails. This makes the total number of subscribers just a vanity metric. What matters are open rates. The people who actually open your emails and read them.

The problem is that Substack doesn’t make cleaning your email list easy.

So, I took on this challenge, and if you want to know how to clean your email list, the right way, keep reading.

Why do this in the first place?

Removing a few hundred or even a thousand subscribers feels like you’ve become less important in the world.

But it must be done for two reasons:

• Increase deliverability rates (so your emails don’t land in the spam folder, which can negatively impact every newsletter you send by lowering your open rates)

• If you sell ads or sponsorships, advertisers want accurate numbers (10k subs with a 10% open rate is a huge red flag. That’s like having only 1k real subs)

Before we start, export your entire list just in case. Go to the Subscribers menu, scroll down a bit, and click the three dots.

Send a quick email

Most people would be tempted to filter their subscribers based on open rates and delete those who haven’t opened any email in the last few months. Don’t do this.

Instead, send a quick email asking if they still want to receive your emails.

Why? Because some email opens aren’t tracked, and you risk removing people who read your emails.

Here’s the email I sent to my list of subscribers:

Subject Line:
Reply to avoid removal

Email:
Hey Peter here,

I'm doing a subscriber list cleanup. 

Reply with a simple "yes" if you want to keep receiving my emails where I share my strategies and systems to write content, build digital products and earn from your writing. 

Otherwise, you'll be removed from the email list. 

Talk soon,
Peter

A short and simple email is enough. Don’t overcomplicate it. Feel free to use my email after you replace the name and newsletter value proposition.

I didn’t send this email to my entire list because I don’t have to. I filtered it first using these filters:

• Emails opened (last 6 months) is 0

• Subscription date is before last month (because subs from a few days ago haven’t received any newsletters yet)

• Post views in the last 6 months is 0

I thought Substack sucks when it comes to analytics but the amount of filters is quite nice.

I have 136 subscribers who haven’t opened any emails in the last 6 months. For my list of 578 subscribers, that’s quite a lot. But just like I mentioned before, not all opens are tracked, so the real number is lower.

I exported those 136 emails for later and then sent the email from above to them.

To send an email to a filtered list, click the checkbox in the table navigation bar, click Select all, then click Send email. Check the red arrows in the image above.

Now the painful part

Because Substack doesn’t make this easier, you have to manually check who replied and who didn’t.

Before doing this, I waited 3 days to make sure everyone had the chance to open and reply to my email.

I planned to use the exported list of 136 emails to check who replied and who didn’t. But to my surprise, I got no responses from those people. And only one person opened that email. Looks like those filters are doing a great job.

So I put on my Infinity Gauntlet and snapped out of existence 136 email subscribers.

Before and after open rates

Before the clean-up, my open rates would rarely cross 30%. Usually, they would be around 22-27%.

My last newsletter reached 31% this time. It's not a huge improvement, but it's good enough. What sucks is that when I was using a platform like Convertkit I was getting 30-40% open rates without trying. I cannot help but think there is something wrong with Substack’s email deliverability.

How often should we remove inactive subs?

Six months is a good timeframe. It also fits with Substack’s filters that don’t go back farther than 6 months.

I have to say, Substack looks like a mess when it comes to newsletter analytics.

We don’t have a lot of information about subscribers. The star metric is weird, and I see many subs with 5 stars that never opened any emails. Should we remove those or not? No idea, but I sent the engagement email just to be sure.

Talk soon,

Peter

P.S. If you’re ready to monetize your newsletter, learn how to Make Your First $1k Selling Ebooks on Gumroad.