If someone hasn't opened your emails in six months, deleting them feels like the obvious thing to do.
They're inactive, costing you money, and dragging down your engagement metrics.
So you remove them.
Problem solved.
Except...
What if the problem wasn't the subscriber?
What if they were simply inactive?
Yes, there is a difference.
Imagine you have a shop and a customer who visits regularly.
They come in, browse around, ask questions, and occasionally buy something.
Then they stop coming in.
A month passes.
Then three.
Then six.
You could conclude they're no longer interested.
And you might be right.
But you don't actually know because it's life and anything could have happened.
Maybe they travelled.
Or maybe work got hectic.
Or maybe something else became more important for a while.
Now imagine another customer who still comes into your shop every few weeks.
They browse.
They look around.
But over time, they stop asking questions, stop showing interest in anything new you sell, and eventually, every visit looks the same.
They're still showing up.
They're just not really interested anymore.
Which customer would concern you more?
The person who hasn't visited in six months?
Or the person who's still showing up but becoming less interested every time?
That's the problem with treating inactivity as disengagement.
Inactivity is a behaviour, while disengagement is a relationship state.
An inactive subscriber may have had other things competing for their attention.
A disengaged subscriber can open almost every email you send while gradually caring less about your business.
The first subscriber looks worse on your dashboard.
The second relationship is worse for your business.
That's why I wouldn't make inactivity the deciding factor when removing a subscriber from your list.
I'd look for evidence that the relationship has actually weakened.
Before deleting them, I'd look at what happened before they went quiet.
Have they shown meaningful engagement before?
Did they ever reply, click, or regularly interact with your emails?
Do they still respond when you send something highly relevant?
Have they gradually become less curious over time?
Have they had enough opportunities to reconnect?
And are they completely unresponsive, or simply less active than they used to be?
Those questions won't give you a perfect answer.
But they give you something your dashboard can't.
Context.
And context matters because list hygiene and audience health are two different things.
You can remove thousands of inactive subscribers and watch your open rate improve.
But that doesn't mean you've necessarily made the relationship with the people who remain any warmer.
All you've done is remove some of the evidence that something was wrong.
All I'm trying to tell you is that inactivity should be a reason to investigate, not automatically a reason to delete, because the goal isn't to have the smallest, cleanest list possible, but to have a list of people who still have a reason to stay close.
That's all for now. Talk soon.
Chike
P.S. If you're trying to work out whether your audience has genuinely gone cold or you're simply dealing with a lot of inactive subscribers, take the Audience Warmth Assessment. It'll help you see where the relationship may be weakening and what to investigate first.
