(UPDATE 2) I lost half my subscribers yesterday!

UPDATE 2: So 150 of my HOT subscribers are no longer opening my emails. I am not sure what happened. I have to say, a year ago I moved from MAILERLITE to KIT. I had hoped to do this, based on advice from Thomas about the superiority of KIT.

However, what you need to know is you don’t automatically get tracking of your followers. You cannot SORT your subscribers by if they opened the last 3 campaigns—like you can with Mailerlite. To get this functionality, you have to do the LEVEL 3 Membership with Kit, whereas it’s a normal feature of Mailerlite (even of free Mailerlite).

SOOO frustrated with KIT. I wish I hadn’t changed. I don’t see a benefit and have lost control of feeling the pulse of my list.

Also, the transition in itself I think is the cause for my drop in open rate. With Mailerlite, I had 38.98% open rate. WIth KIT, this has dropped to 26% from the beginning.

My plan: I have downloaded my REGULAR OPENERS from last year’s list and will compare it to the COLD subscriber list to see if some people were accidentally offboarded—to add them, and to try to wake up the overlapped people, if it’s not too late.

UPDATE: Worse than I thought.

I sent an email yesterday. Usually I have 800 opens for each email, today I got 600. Open rate is higher, to be expected.

I’m hoping the missing 200 openers will still open—and that I haven’t kicked them out of my list!

I sent a message to KIT helpdesk to find out if I might have offboarded some openers.

“Kit defines cold subscribers as those who haven't opened or clicked in the last 90 days (or 30 days if they've been subscribed for fewer than 90 days).”

I wonder if some people have an email server that “automatically” sends back an open signal. I do have some subscribers who “click” on everything, including unsubscribe, every month. I feel like it is a bot.

I’ve been working for 5 years on building my email list. I got up to more than 3000 followers and paused on most promotions (especially group promotions) for growth in order to fine-tune my list.

I wanted more engagement, so my focus was to pull the current readers in—or get rid of people who didn’t care. So I only did curated one-on-one author swaps, most of which were for sales not reader magnets. Also, I increased my email to once per week to stay in front of the reader.

Not much growth in the past year because of this strategy.

2 weeks ago, Kit informed me they are upping my rates. I decided to not pay the increase, especially with such a low open rate. So a week ago, I implemented two cold subscriber off-boarding automations.

1628 email addresses were included in the pogrom.

Whether or not it was a good idea, I let KIT decide if a person was a cold subscriber or not—I didn’t fine-tooth-comb the group.

(The subject lines of the two emails were:

🤨 Is it time to say goodbye? and

✋ This might be goodbye forever)

41 of these people chose to CLICK and stay IN my newsletter group. 🥳

18 people directly UNSUBSCRIBED

1575 email addresses COMPLETELY IGNORED my emails.

So now my list is MORE ALIVE, but like a pruned tree it looks wimpy.

We’ll see what the open rates look like after this.

October 7

October 14

After a year in Kit, instead of paying $890/year at renewal, My fee will be $590/year, as far as I understand. So effectively save $300/year along with an increase (I hope) in reader engagement.

I had kept my numbers high in the off chance I would move forward with traditional publisher, but I think I’ll focus on an engaged list rather than a large list—at leas if I go with a publisher, they’ll know I have a strategy, which is better than a large list with no strategy or engagement.

Still, it hurts to prune that number in half.

50% un-engagement makes me worried about my essential deliverability.