Direct Magazine has an article in their July 2006 issue showing how the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society improved the effectiveness of their email campaigns by — get this — slashing their email lists. They reduced their email subscriber list from 33,636 subscribers to only 4,510. That’s a whopping 87 percent drop!

The director of emarketing of this nonprofit org explained that there was no point in having a large list when they have a poor open rate and a “pretty bad” clickthrough rate. The LLS found that their subscribers were not getting their emails because their emails were blocked by email providers. The reason? Too many spam complaints, which results in their emails being blocked by ISPs. So what they did was to request their subscribers again for permission to email them.

The result was a huge drop in their subscribers list. But spam complaints also dropped from 27 or 0.51% per campaign to zero, and the average open rate rose from 25.2% to 53.1%. Average click-through rate rose from 6.6% to 21.5%. What’s surprising is that average clicks per campaign remained the same.

This approach feels too drastic, even for me. But I like their reasoning, which I find to make absolute sense. Why hang on to a gargantuan email list when these people are not interested in what you have to say anyway? It feels good to have 30,000 subscribers but if only 300 of that click on your emails, then something is not right somewhere. This is a strategy worth thinking over.

You can read the full article from Direct Magazine