According to conventional wisdom, if email subscribers remain inactive for at least one year, it's best to remove them from your list.

But Dela Quist takes a contrarian view. "Inactivity is normal activity," he tells Ken Magill in an interview at the Magill Report. "Inactivity is the default position for consumers. Highly engaged people are outliers."

Quist says there's no real need to cull inactive subscribers from your list. He offers reasons like these:

• In his experience, inactive subscribers comprise 35 to 65 percent of every legitimate email list.
• If you make a habit of culling them, and don't replace them with a larger number of new subscribers, you will effectively obliterate your list within five years.

"Quist calls inactive names on permission-based lists 'unemotional subscribers,'" reports Magill. They don't find your messages annoying, argues Quist—they simply don't need your product or service at the moment. And they tend to open messages, eventually, at a rate of one to three percent.

→ end article preview
Read the Full Article