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Today, I almost made a HUGE mistake!

I was 1 click away from deleting almost 2000 supposedly “inactive” subscribers from my Getresponse mailing list!

Inactive subscribers to me… are people that have joined my mailing list for the past 2 years without opening a single one of my emails.

What’s the point of having people on your list that never opens your emails, right!?

So in my GetResponse dashboard; I searched for all of my subscribers, selected a date range from 2 years ago up until about a few months back, and then set a criteria to display only subscribers that have never open my emails.

Viola!

The result was about 2000 inactive subscribers. These are people that are costing me money just by keeping them on my mailing list.

So I wanted to give them one last chance, and to see if these subscribers were truly inactive. So I sent them this final email with the subject line:

I AM DELETING YOU FROM MY MAILING LIST!

———————————-Email Body————————————–

This is not a test. I am deleting you from my email list!

I am deleting close to 2,000 INACTIVE email subscribers from my email list. Your email is a part of this 2000 inactive list.

Inactive meaning you have not open a single email from me for the last 2 years!

If this is a mistake, and you are an active subscriber that have at least opened my email one time before in the last 6 months, please reply and let me know!

Otherwise, you will not hear from me again.

Or if you don’t want to receive emails from me, just click on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email and I won’t contact you ever again. Thank you!

————————————————————————

After sending this email to my 2000 supposedly inactive subscribers, I expected about 99% of these emails to go unnoticed. After all, these were people that never once opened my emails!

Within 1 hour of sending, I’ve already gotten angry replies from people that were offended that I was deleting them from my list. These people were actually opening my emails regularly, but for some reasons, the opening stats were never recorded in the GetResponse system.

I am totally confused now!

I was about to delete 2000 subscribers, whom many were actually active subscribers.

Anyhow, I have contacted getresponse about this, and to see what is the best practice in removing real “inactive” subscribers.

Stay tuned.