Cleaning your email list gets you more opens than writing subject lines.

Year our newsletter open rates dropped below 15% even though we had great content. I spent three weeks testing subject lines and send times but nothing seemed to help. The numbers stayed low.

The real issue was that Gmail and Apple Mail started marking our emails as spam. Why? Because many people were ignoring them. We had thousands of subscribers who hadn’t opened a single email in over six months. These were accounts ghosts in our database.

I decided to run a re- campaign. It was simple: a text-based email asking if they still wanted to hear from us. I gave them a choice—click "yes" if they wanted to stay or let us know if they were done.

Only a handful responded with a yes. So I deleted over 4,000 contacts the next morning. It was genuinely terrifying to see our subscriber count drop so much overnight.. I didn’t look back.

The next week our open rate jumped to 42%. Why? Because email providers started seeing engagement. The signals were clear—people were opening, reading and interacting. Our domain reputation improved instantly.

A smaller list of readers is always more valuable, than a massive list of ghosts dragging down your domain reputation. You can’t engagement. You can’t force rates. You have to earn them by being relevant.

So how often do you purge subscribers from your own database?. What criteria do you use? Do you set a threshold—like six months of inactivity?. Do you run re-engagement campaigns first? I’d love to hear your approach.