Hey Reader,

A few weeks ago I walked you through the 3 main metrics worth watching in your email dashboard: open rate, click rate, and unsubscribe rate. We talked about healthy benchmarks to aim for and what the data is telling you when you're not hitting those marks.

While I mentioned optimizing your subject line as the best place to start increasing your open rates, there's another thing that creates a much bigger impact in this area than most people even realize... and that is deliverability.

"Deliverability" is just whether or not your email actually makes it to your subscriber's inbox. It has less to do with how "good" your emails are and more to do with how many people on your list are actually engaging with the stuff you're sending.

But why does that matter?

Because every time you send an email that somebody doesn't open (or marks as spam), it sends a signal to email providers like Gmail, Microsoft and Apple Mail that your emails are not valuable. As a result, they're more likely to end up in your subscriber's promotions tab, spam folder, or bounce and fail to be delivered altogether.

And that's why it's so important to maintain a healthy email list.

So, how do you keep an email list healthy?

By deleting people from it.

This is the point at which most artists I talk to check out. There's so much emphasis put on GROWING your email list, that it's unfathomable to consider removing a single hard-won subscriber.

But here's the thing...if people aren't opening or reading your emails they've gotta go.

Because as painful as it is to think about cutting them out, if you're keeping those cold subscribers on your list, you're actually making it harder for your emails to land in the inboxes of your superfans. You know, the people who open every single one (and buy things like music, tickets and merch).

It's not something you just do once and then forget about though. You should be cleaning your list (ie: identifying and removing cold subscribers) about every 90 days.

I'm not saying to delete those people without giving them a chance to tell you they wanna stick around. You would put those cold subscribers through a re-engagement sequence. At the end of it, anybody who doesn't re-activate gets removed.

Once you've cut the dead weight, you're left with a leaner list of subscribers who are actually excited to hear from you and as a result...

Even though your total subscribers go down, your open and click-through rates go up!

Those increases send a very positive signal to email providers and help your emails land comfortably at the top of your subscriber's inbox.

And what does all of this have to do with getting people to open your emails?

Simple: people can't open your emails if they don't see them.

Hope that helps,