The Truth About List Hygiene Most Ecomm Stores Hate Hearing

Summer has finally arrived down south and OMG… it is hot and humid.

Everyone is miserable outside, except for the mini-herb garden we have out on the balcony.

A few months ago we picked up basil, oregano, cilantro and rosemary plants. 

With out question basil is my favorite. There’s something about the smell of fresh basil that just screams “summer time!’. I love using it on pizza, salads, and fresh pesto. 

I’m pretty a novice gardener, but I know just enough to be dangerous.

I keep the plants in direct sunlight, water them regularly, and most importantly I learned the basics of pruning.

The interesting thing about basil is if you don’t prune it, it will start to grow flowers. While these flowers are pretty, they actually slow down leaf production. 

Which is NOT what you want if you’re trying to make pesto pasta once a month.

To keep your basil plant healthy you need to regularly chop off an entire branch or two to stimulate new growth.

I’ll be honest the first time I did this it felt wrong. 

If I want more fresh, new leaves then why would I chop off a whole section of the plant?

But a few weeks later my doubts were erased when the plant had almost doubled the leaves.

This counterintuitive advice is always the hardest to implement.

It’s just like email list hygiene. 

You spend a lot of time, effort and money to grow your list into a big ol’ money plant.

So when someone tells you to delete your unengaged subscribers, it's really hard to accept.

This just happened to my client who’s email list hit 700,000 subscribers. That’s a huge achievement, but unfortunately about 150,000 of those emails are completely unengaged. 

They have been on their email list for at least one year but haven’t purchased or opened or clicked an email.

These subscribers are actually destroying his overall email revenue performance by tanking deliverability.

When Inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo see that no thousands of their users aren’t opening your emails, or even worse, you’re sending to accounts that are abandoned, you’ll get beat down with the mighty SPAM HAMMER.

Bad news all around.

So if you want a big, bushy email money plant, you gotta suck it up and trim that email list.

If you don’t have the guts to do it yourself, I’m happy to whip out my pruning shears for ya’.