EP 99: Cleaning Your Email List

00:00:00 [Alison]
That’s why

00:00:00 [Melissa]
this is important.
00:00:01 [Melissa]
Kid who actually people show up to the birthday party and cut the ones that don’t RSVP.

00:00:07 [Alison]
There it is.
00:00:07 [Alison]
There it is.

00:00:08 [Melissa]
No longer my friend.
00:00:09 [Melissa]
No more no more getting invited.
00:00:10 [Melissa]
None of that kind of stuff.
00:00:13 [Melissa]
Welcome to Get Booked, a photography podcast.

00:00:16 [Alison]
I’m Allison, active duty Marine Corps spouse, family photographer, and business mentor.

00:00:20 [Melissa]
And I’m Melissa, lifestyle newborn photographer turned SEO expert for photographers.

00:00:24 [Alison]
Between us, we have twenty seven years in the industry, nine business relocations, and a lot of lessons learned the hard way through experience.

00:00:31 [Melissa]
We’re here to help you get visible, get clients, and build a business that actually books.

00:00:36 [Alison]
Let’s go.
00:00:40 [Alison]
Alright, guys.
00:00:41 [Alison]
Welcome back.
00:00:41 [Alison]
We are talking about a super hot topic, cleaning your email list.
00:00:46 [Alison]
If you have never if first of all, we hope that you have an email list and that your call addresses from inquiries and leads and lead magnets and all kinds of other things we’ve had previous episodes on, but you also wanna take care to be emailing that list and from time to time cleaning that list.

00:01:03 [Alison]
And yes, why cleaning, we do mean removing.
00:01:06 [Alison]
Okay.
00:01:07 [Alison]
So we do bring we do mean to actually remove addresses that you have worked so hard to acquire.

00:01:14 [Melissa]
Or try to reengage them before removing.
00:01:16 [Melissa]
You don’t have to do that.

00:01:17 [Alison]
Yeah.
00:01:18 [Alison]
We’re going to get into it, but clean

00:01:19 [Melissa]
on the remove them and move on.

00:01:21 [Alison]
Yep.
00:01:21 [Alison]
So what exactly is cleaning your list?
00:01:24 [Alison]
It is removing or re segmenting those email addresses because they’re dead weight.
00:01:30 [Alison]
Okay.
00:01:31 [Alison]
Cleaning your list math is it’s all a math game, right?

00:01:34 [Alison]
All these numbers, percentages and whatnot are a math game.
00:01:37 [Alison]
The email addresses on your list that are not opening, clicking, hitting reply to your emails are bringing those percentages down.
00:01:48 [Alison]
They’re doing you a disfavor.

00:01:49 [Melissa]
And your reputation down.

00:01:50 [Alison]
And your reputation.
00:01:52 [Alison]
So even if you have not done an email list in six months, a year, what have you, The rules changed six months ago in December 2025, where email providers, Gmail and Yahoo, tightened down the rules for deliverability.
00:02:07 [Alison]
If you’ve gotten things from clients that said, oh, your your email went to spam.
00:02:11 [Alison]
That’s part of the rule.
00:02:13 [Alison]
Or if you’re finding that you’re getting you’re receiving emails in different parts or types of your inbox that you used to get somewhere else or used to hit in your inbox and it’s landing in spam or trash, that’s evidence of those rules.

00:02:24 [Alison]
So even if you’ve done nothing, the rules have getting delivered and getting through to an actual inbox.
00:02:30 [Alison]
Even if somebody opted in to your freebie or asked to join voluntarily, the rules have changed and you’ve you’ve got to play along, okay, to to increase your rates.
00:02:39 [Alison]
Right?
00:02:40 [Alison]
And so everything like an open rate, the percentage of people opening your emails, clicking somewhere in your emails, and replying to your emails, all affect your reputation and your deliverability.
00:02:53 [Alison]
So by cleaning your list, you’re effectively increasing your percentages so that you are you have a better sender reputation.

00:03:01 [Alison]
Hope that makes sense.
00:03:04 [Alison]
That’s why this

00:03:05 [Melissa]
is important.
00:03:05 [Melissa]
Popular kid who actually people show up to the birthday party and cause that don’t RSVP.

00:03:11 [Alison]
There it is.
00:03:11 [Alison]
There it is.

00:03:12 [Melissa]
No longer my friend.
00:03:13 [Melissa]
No more no more getting invited.
00:03:15 [Melissa]
None of that kind of stuff.

00:03:17 [Alison]
For years, Melissa told me to start a Facebook group.
00:03:20 [Alison]
For years, I said no.
00:03:22 [Alison]
And then I thought about 2018 me.
00:03:24 [Alison]
Mid move, rebuilding my business, moving from Okinawa back to Virginia from scratch, just desperate for someone who had been through it.
00:03:31 [Alison]
Someone to ask them questions, get real answers and not feel so alone in the process.

00:03:35 [Alison]
Someone who wasn’t going to tell me to just start over like that was a totally normal thing to say.
00:03:40 [Alison]
I was a person moving my business because photographers and the military are a dime a dozen.
00:03:45 [Alison]
That’s exactly what GetBookedAnywhere is.
00:03:47 [Alison]
It’s a free Facebook community for women business owners like you who are relocating, rebuilding, or refining, and it’s the place I wish had existed when I needed it most.
00:03:58 [Alison]
Inside the group, you’re gonna find women who have been exactly where you are.

00:04:01 [Alison]
You can ask questions without feeling stupid, get real feedback without the fluff from me, from others, share your wins with people who actually understand what a big deal it is instead of a deadpan face from your husband, or community that gets the unique chaos of building something that has to move with you.
00:04:16 [Alison]
No gatekeeping, no judgment, no lurking alone, wondering if anyone else is going through this because they are and we’re gonna find them.
00:04:23 [Alison]
The link to join is in the show notes.
00:04:24 [Alison]
So come, it’s free, it’s active, and your people are already waiting.
00:04:30 [Alison]
This can be kind of tricky because we work really hard to get all these email addresses and I totally get it.

00:04:36 [Alison]
We obsess over, you know, the lead magnet.
00:04:39 [Alison]
Is it right?
00:04:40 [Alison]
Do, you know, we had all these people on a wait list for this one little mini session or, you know, all these clients that have worked with you over the one, two, three years.
00:04:48 [Alison]
And it’s even more difficult when you’re just starting to build a wait list or you’ve just gotten to a new area, even if you’re an established photographer and your your wait list and your email list feels puny.
00:04:58 [Alison]
Right?

00:04:59 [Alison]
But we really wanna encourage you to quit focusing on the number of addresses and focus on the relationship in the community.
00:05:07 [Alison]
K?
00:05:08 [Alison]
It is far more profitable and better for you in the long run that you have twenty, thirty, 50 highly engaged rather than 300 disengaged and disassociated email addresses.
00:05:19 [Alison]
So let it go.
00:05:21 [Alison]
We’ll let it go.

00:05:23 [Melissa]
Yeah.
00:05:24 [Melissa]
Allison and I are in a bunch of different email marketing group type things.
00:05:27 [Melissa]
And so we see on the other side too, like more business to business perspective.
00:05:32 [Melissa]
And there are a lot of times people in there will talk about that they did better with a list of 1,500 than they do with a list of 10,000 because they’ve made sure at that 1,500, it was much more cultivated for them.
00:05:43 [Melissa]
I’ve done where I’ve built my email list through, like, bundles and gotten people on my email list that were not good quality email addresses.

00:05:50 [Melissa]
If the people, they were just interested in the freebie, and then they’re not interested in anything else, and then they’re dragging down my reputation because they’re not opening those emails, and so I need to clean them.
00:05:59 [Melissa]
You could have people that maybe have moved, you know, and that they’re or they’re out of the stage of life, you know, maybe you’re a wedding photographer and they’re no longer getting married and they’re outside of where friends are getting married.
00:06:08 [Melissa]
And so your emails, they’re just not opening them because they don’t know.
00:06:12 [Melissa]
It’s not relevant to them anymore.
00:06:14 [Melissa]
And the thing is, it used to be it wasn’t a big deal, and it depends too.

00:06:17 [Melissa]
Become email providers will charge you per email.
00:06:20 [Melissa]
So that’s another thing to look at.
00:06:21 [Melissa]
If you have an email provider that if you have a 100 people on your email list, it’s price a.
00:06:26 [Melissa]
But if you have a 101, it’s price b because it goes up.
00:06:29 [Melissa]
You know, you may have to be more on top of this.

00:06:31 [Melissa]
And I just went through and did this.
00:06:33 [Melissa]
Not that my open rates were super low because as Allison and I have read over and over again, industry standard is 20%, which sounds horrible.
00:06:41 [Melissa]
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m like, that’s super sad.
00:06:43 [Melissa]
They’re like, if I have a 100 people on my list, 20 people are opening it, no.
00:06:47 [Melissa]
I want 80% opening it.

00:06:49 [Alison]
Between 5060%.

00:06:51 [Melissa]
I’m happy there.
00:06:51 [Melissa]
And so but I think when you

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00:07:52 [Melissa]
A smaller business like us, I wouldn’t look at that 20.
00:07:55 [Melissa]
If you’re getting less than 20%, that is a big problem.
00:07:57 [Melissa]
To me, that would be a huge red flag.
00:07:59 [Melissa]
But I know for my list, I get anywhere from 40 to 60%.
00:08:02 [Melissa]
If it’s the full list, if it’s a more targeted smaller thing, then I might get 60 or 70, maybe even 80%.

00:08:09 [Melissa]
Keep in mind so when you read that at 20%, I would actually say if your open rates are under 40%, that would be a red flag to me.
00:08:16 [Melissa]
Like, I would wanna go and clean up that email list and see what’s going on.
00:08:19 [Melissa]
And so like I said, I just did this because I was, you know what?
00:08:22 [Melissa]
I know I’ve run some different on Facebook ads.
00:08:25 [Melissa]
I’ve gotten in some people that I was, I don’t think you’re the best fit for, like, you know, like, I don’t I don’t fit what you’re looking for.

00:08:31 [Melissa]
And I was like, I need to I need to do a little bit of a purge and stuff.
00:08:35 [Melissa]
And it can be a vanity metric.
00:08:37 [Melissa]
A lot of people really love to brag about how big their email list is, but, and if you were to ask this yeah.
00:08:43 [Melissa]
It is a matter of you were to be like, like, okay.
00:08:44 [Melissa]
Well, what’s your open rates?

00:08:46 [Melissa]
Or how many people are yeah.
00:08:47 [Melissa]
If you probably at that point said, what’s your open rate?
00:08:49 [Melissa]
It’s gonna change a lot.
00:08:50 [Melissa]
Mhmm.
00:08:50 [Melissa]
It’s gonna be a lot different than what you think it is and stuff.

00:08:53 [Melissa]
So so we’re gonna talk a little bit right now about so how do you clean your email list?
00:08:57 [Melissa]
Alright.
00:08:57 [Melissa]
So I wanna at least go and I’m gonna walk you through a few steps that it’s not like just delete right away, guys.
00:09:03 [Melissa]
So you can walk through these steps with me and you can make a decision.
00:09:06 [Melissa]
But what you wanna do is go into your email provider.

00:09:09 [Melissa]
I use Flodesk.
00:09:10 [Melissa]
So I go in there, I go to the audience section, and then I’m gonna filter it.
00:09:14 [Melissa]
And I’m filtering it based off of activity.
00:09:17 [Melissa]
So if they have not been active, meaning they have not opened an email and they have not clicked on an email in the last I did six months.
00:09:24 [Melissa]
I would say six months is definitely a safe bet for photographers too.

00:09:28 [Melissa]
Maybe it’s a year though.
00:09:29 [Melissa]
Maybe, Allison and I were talking about this, maybe you do Santa sessions and they only open it for the Santa session or something like that.
00:09:35 [Melissa]
So I would say for a photographer, you go with a year, and that’s if you’re not emailing regularly.
00:09:40 [Melissa]
I will say this, if you are emailing monthly and they’re not opening it, honestly, even if they are on your Santa list, maybe you just pull those off for those one off event type things.
00:09:50 [Melissa]
But if they haven’t opened it in a year, they’re probably not even gonna see it because the less they open it, the less Google wants to put it in their inbox.

00:09:58 [Melissa]
So they’re not gonna see it anyway.
00:10:00 [Melissa]
So I think that a year is probably the most I would go with photographers.
00:10:04 [Melissa]
I personally would probably look at six months, and that’s what I did for my own was I just pulled for six months.
00:10:09 [Melissa]
Some people will say, you know, thirty days, that if they haven’t opened or clicked on something in thirty days.
00:10:14 [Melissa]
But it depends.

00:10:15 [Melissa]
I know you guys.
00:10:16 [Melissa]
Well and I know you guys.
00:10:17 [Melissa]
I love you.
00:10:18 [Melissa]
I I know you’re not emailing that often for the most part.
00:10:21 [Melissa]
So And

00:10:21 [Alison]
you don’t need to be

00:10:23 [Melissa]
thirty days.
00:10:24 [Melissa]
You put up like

00:10:25 [Alison]
no one.
00:10:25 [Alison]
Yeah.
00:10:26 [Alison]
That’s aggressive.
00:10:27 [Alison]
That’s somebody else.

00:10:28 [Melissa]
Yeah.
00:10:28 [Melissa]
So once you’ve got that narrowed down, we’re now, like, I filtered mine by activity, you know, is greater than six months since they last interacted.
00:10:35 [Melissa]
What I did then was I put them into their own segment.
00:10:38 [Melissa]
So Flodesk does segments.
00:10:39 [Melissa]
Other places will do tags.

00:10:40 [Melissa]
Basically, you wanna mark all of those people as just, like, cold subscribers.
00:10:44 [Melissa]
Once I had them in their own segment, I could see I had, like, 600 and something in there of cold subscribers.
00:10:49 [Melissa]
You know, you have a couple options at that point.
00:10:51 [Melissa]
So for starters, with those cold subscribers, you do not want to email them right now.
00:10:58 [Melissa]
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00:11:00 [Melissa]
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00:11:08 [Melissa]
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00:11:25 [Melissa]
The link to register is in the show notes or head to pictureperfectrankings.com/mistakes.

00:11:32 [Melissa]
When you are sending out an email to your whole list, you do not want to email those cold subscribers because they’re already not opening.
00:11:38 [Melissa]
So they’re dragging your they’re they’re taking the ship down, and we want to keep the ship floating.
00:11:42 [Melissa]
So you can just entirely and just not send them emails.
00:11:46 [Melissa]
And then at a later date, if you want, you could try to do some warmup emails.
00:11:50 [Melissa]
I highly recommend some kind of freebie, like download thing.

00:11:53 [Melissa]
Like even as a photographer, you could give like a what to wear guide.
00:11:56 [Melissa]
You could give a how to prepare for a session.
00:11:58 [Melissa]
You could give a best activities with the kids at Christmas time.
00:12:01 [Melissa]
Something like, you could do something like that.
00:12:03 [Melissa]
It’s a quick and easy PDF download.

00:12:05 [Melissa]
You already have their email address, so they don’t even have to enter that.
00:12:07 [Melissa]
It’s just a button they click, and it goes to maybe a doc on Google, and they are able to download, you know, whatever it is.
00:12:13 [Melissa]
That’s an easy way to start getting activity, have something in there free.
00:12:16 [Melissa]
But you could do, like, a warm up sequence if you want like that.
00:12:19 [Melissa]
I did option two, which is what I call the breakup email.

00:12:23 [Melissa]
And I literally had gotten one of these from Jenna Kutcher’s email list.
00:12:26 [Melissa]
She’s a podcast host and stuff like that.
00:12:29 [Melissa]
And I got one from her, and I was like, oh, no.
00:12:30 [Melissa]
No.
00:12:31 [Melissa]
No.

00:12:31 [Melissa]
I do wanna stay on your list.
00:12:32 [Melissa]
I mean, I don’t obviously, I’m not reading them enough or clicking on them, but I wanna stay on your list.
00:12:36 [Melissa]
Uh-huh.
00:12:37 [Melissa]
And so I clicked the button, and it kept me back on the list.
00:12:40 [Melissa]
So that was the route I took, was I sent a breakup email, and I was like, hey.

00:12:44 [Melissa]
You haven’t opened anything.
00:12:46 [Melissa]
I get it.
00:12:46 [Melissa]
If you I don’t know what it was.
00:12:47 [Melissa]
It was just something funny.
00:12:48 [Melissa]
I always like to make them funny and lighthearted.

00:12:50 [Melissa]
But I made a button that the action was when they clicked that button, it took them out of my cult subscribers.
00:12:56 [Melissa]
So it would remove the tag for you, or you would have them remove that person from a segment.
00:13:01 [Melissa]
So now they’ve basically opted back in kind of thing.
00:13:04 [Melissa]
Then once you’re done with that so now I think I had, like, 40 or so people who stuck around.
00:13:09 [Melissa]
So I was like, okay.

00:13:09 [Melissa]
Cool.
00:13:10 [Melissa]
You’re gonna hang out.
00:13:11 [Melissa]
That’s great.
00:13:12 [Melissa]
With the other 600 at that point, I could either try to reengage them, offer them a freebie download and send them in.
00:13:19 [Melissa]
I just decided to, you know, I just decided to delete and move on.

00:13:22 [Melissa]
You know?
00:13:23 [Melissa]
I had, like, some frozen level of let it go energy going that day, and I was just like, peace out.
00:13:27 [Melissa]
Y’all are gone.
00:13:28 [Melissa]
I’m not even gonna worry about it.
00:13:30 [Melissa]
And so I just went ahead and deleted it.

00:13:31 [Melissa]
So and that was the thing.
00:13:33 [Melissa]
I mean, I took my email list from, like, 2,000 down to, like, 1,400, you know, something like that.
00:13:38 [Melissa]
That’s a big jump.
00:13:38 [Melissa]
That’s a third of my list, but it’s not engaged.
00:13:41 [Melissa]
If a third of the people getting my email haven’t opened an email in six months, what is that telling Google?

00:13:46 [Melissa]
It’s telling Google, like, there’s a good amount of people.
00:13:48 [Melissa]
30% of the people aren’t interested has to offer.
00:13:51 [Melissa]
So that was my thought.
00:13:52 [Melissa]
It was like, alright.
00:13:52 [Melissa]
Well, if I get those out, now my open rates are gonna go up even more.

00:13:56 [Melissa]
It’s gonna show to Google, oh, yeah.
00:13:58 [Melissa]
Most of her list opens her email.
00:13:59 [Melissa]
You know?
00:14:00 [Melissa]
That’s what I’m looking for is to try and get into that thing.
00:14:02 [Melissa]
Because I don’t I don’t even try to go under, like, the 20%, like I was saying before.

00:14:06 [Melissa]
My open rates are typically around 40.
00:14:08 [Melissa]
I think after I did that, they’re hovering around, like, 50 to 60% now.
00:14:11 [Melissa]
So it was like

00:14:13 [Alison]
interesting to see what your rates are after this.
00:14:15 [Alison]
That’ll be it.

00:14:16 [Melissa]
And I’ve only sent one email since I did this, so I need to look at that.
00:14:20 [Melissa]
Still now.
00:14:21 [Melissa]
Yeah.
00:14:21 [Melissa]
I still I need a couple more emails to go out to see where it’s at.
00:14:24 [Melissa]
But, you know, now the next step is to get back to work, getting new people on my list, and then Mhmm.

00:14:29 [Melissa]
Emailing the people who are currently on there.
00:14:31 [Melissa]
So I always eat Tuesday podcast episode.
00:14:33 [Melissa]
I’m very good about that.
00:14:35 [Melissa]
And I’m trying to work on getting more emails out.
00:14:38 [Melissa]
I kinda ebb and flow.

00:14:39 [Melissa]
Like, I’ll send more, but I’m consistent with at least once a week people are getting an email from me.
00:14:45 [Melissa]
And then I’m building my email list.
00:14:46 [Melissa]
So that’s kinda where I’m at now.
00:14:48 [Melissa]
Even though I lost that 600, I’m working to bring more people in who are a better fit with what I offer and hopefully will be more engaged.
00:14:56 [Melissa]
But I will probably set something on the calendar that once every six months, I’ll go through and just go ahead and start purging anyone that hasn’t interacted six months because what’s the point of being on my list then?

00:15:06 [Alison]
That’s it.
00:15:06 [Alison]
So to recap, go into your email provider, filter out based on last activity, not within a certain time frame of your choosing.
00:15:15 [Alison]
You can pull them into a different segment, and you can either delete them, try to reengage them with a different email, or just let them sit in a different segment and exclude that segment altogether until you have something big you want to tell everybody about.
00:15:28 [Alison]
So your choice, you don’t have to delete them right away, but you definitely want to at least clean something to increase it doesn’t cut that dead weight.
00:15:36 [Alison]
So,

00:15:37 [Melissa]
yeah, I will say though, if let’s say you do have like something like Santa coming up, if you throw them back in with your email list and they haven’t opened, it’s going to cause issues.
00:15:47 [Melissa]
So you need to warm them up before you put them back on your list.
00:15:51 [Melissa]
Because if if you have if you know, like, okay, Santa’s coming up, and I wanna get these people warmed up, you need to just be emailing, like, small batches of them and seeing if you can get them to reengage.
00:16:01 [Melissa]
Because if you just throw everybody back in, you just started right back where you were.
00:16:05 [Melissa]
So I honestly am gonna send a breakup email and move on.

00:16:08 [Alison]
There you go.
00:16:09 [Alison]
Alright.
00:16:10 [Alison]
If you have questions, y’all know where to find us on Instagram.
00:16:12 [Alison]
Leave us a review.
00:16:13 [Alison]
Stars.

00:16:14 [Alison]
Share us on social.

00:16:16 [Melissa]
Talk to

00:16:16 [Alison]
you later, guys.

00:16:17 [Melissa]
Bye bye.
00:16:20 [Melissa]
Thank you so much for listening.
00:16:21 [Melissa]
If you’re enjoying the show, would you do two things for us?
00:16:24 [Melissa]
First, leave a review.
00:16:25 [Melissa]
Just stars would be awesome.

00:16:27 [Melissa]
And two, forward this episode to a biz bestie, mil spouse, or anyone facing moving their business.
00:16:32 [Melissa]
We’d love it if you shared this episode with even just one person.
00:16:36 [Melissa]
If you have questions, you can reach out to Instagram at alison belle photog, or you can find me, Melissa, in my Facebook group, Picture Perfect Rankings.
00:16:44 [Melissa]
Check the show notes for links, and we’re so excited to have you guys here.