Every subscriber on your list made a decision to be there. Growing that list matters less than what you do with the decision after it's made.

I subscribe to more newsletters than I'll ever admit to counting. Most of them I've stopped reading in any real sense. I glance at the subject line, decide in about a second and a half whether it's worth my attention, and move on. A few, though, I still open every time. Not because I have extra time. Because somewhere along the way, those few earned something the rest never did.

I didn't think much about that difference until I started looking at my own list the same way.

It's a strange thing to admit as someone who sends a newsletter for a living. I spent years focused on the wrong side of that equation, on how to get more people onto the list, rather than on what would make the people already there glad they stayed. Those are not the same project, even though they get talked about as if they are.

For a long time, I built my newsletter the way a lot of people build a newsletter. Get people on the list. Keep them there. Send them things. The list itself felt like the asset, and a bigger number felt like progress.

Then I noticed something about my own behavior as a reader. I'd unsubscribe from lists the moment they started feeling like they only existed to pitch me something. Not because the pitch offended me. Because the emails stopped being about me and started being about what the sender wanted from me. Once I noticed that pattern in my own inbox, I couldn't unsee it in the way I was running my own list.

The uncomfortable question followed pretty quickly. If I'd unsubscribe from a list that felt that way, why would I assume my own subscribers wouldn't do the exact same thing?

That question doesn't stay comfortable for long once you start asking it honestly. It's easy to believe your own emails are the exception, that your list is different, that your subscribers understand the occasional pitch because they know you and trust you.

Some of that might even be true. But it's also exactly what every sender I've ever unsubscribed from probably believed about their own list, right up until I clicked the link at the bottom of their email and never looked back.

I recently removed three out of every four subscribers from my list, the ones who hadn't opened anything since June 1st. I wrote about the decision itself already, so I won't retread the whole story here. But it's worth naming what that decision actually proved, because it's the foundation this issue builds on.

Removing that many people wasn't a growth move. On paper, it looked like the opposite of growth. What it actually did was force a kind of honesty I'd been avoiding. A list stuffed with people who've quietly checked out isn't an asset. It's a number that feels good to look at and does almost nothing else.

The relationship is the asset. The list is just where the relationship happens to live.

Once I accepted that, the real question stopped being how many people are on this list. It became something closer to: would the people still on it resubscribe today, if I asked them to decide again?

That's a harder question to sit with than a subscriber count. A number either goes up or it doesn't, and either way you can look away from it pretty easily. This question doesn't let you look away. It asks something about the actual content going out, not just the mechanics of who's technically still receiving it.

That question changes what "growing a list" is supposed to mean. Growth isn't the number climbing. Growth is whether each person on that list would still say yes if today were the day they had to choose.

Every email is a small renewal of that choice, whether the reader ever thinks about it in those terms. Nobody re-subscribes consciously every week. But they decide, in that second and a half before they open or skip, whether this sender is still worth the attention. String enough of those small decisions together and you get either a relationship or a habit of being ignored.

This is the standard I'm holding myself to now, not because it sounds good in an essay, but because I've been on the other side of it as a reader too many times to pretend otherwise.

Here's something I didn't expect to find useful, but it stuck with me. Gmail and Yahoo don't grade your list by its size either. Their spam and deliverability systems watch engagement patterns over time, not any single send, and they use that pattern to decide whether your email even reaches an inbox at all. 

A sender with a huge list and declining engagement gets treated with more suspicion than a smaller list that actually reads what's sent.

The specifics are almost beside the point, but they're worth knowing. Providers track how often people mark a sender's mail as spam, and they weigh that against everything else happening across that list over time, not against any one email in isolation.

Cross a certain threshold of complaints relative to how much you're sending, and the provider starts routing your mail away from inboxes altogether. It doesn't matter how many people are technically still subscribed. 

The list size never enters into that calculation. Only the pattern of how people actually respond does.

I'm not writing this piece as a deliverability lesson. That's a topic for another day. But it's a strange kind of confirmation. The exact thing I'm describing as a relationship principle turns out to also be exactly what the technical infrastructure of email itself is built to measure. 

Earning attention isn't just the right way to think about a list. It's apparently baked into how the mail even gets delivered.

Here's something I didn't expect to find useful, but it stuck with me. Gmail and Yahoo don't grade your list by its size either. Their spam and deliverability systems watch engagement patterns over time, not any single send, and they use that pattern to decide whether your email even reaches an inbox at all. 

A sender with a huge list and declining engagement gets treated with more suspicion than a smaller list that actually reads what's sent.

The specifics are almost beside the point, but they're worth knowing. Providers track how often people mark a sender's mail as spam, and they weigh that against everything else happening across that list over time, not against any one email in isolation.

Cross a certain threshold of complaints relative to how much you're sending, and the provider starts routing your mail away from inboxes altogether. It doesn't matter how many people are technically still subscribed. 

The list size never enters into that calculation. Only the pattern of how people actually respond does.

I'm not writing this piece as a deliverability lesson. That's a topic for another day. But it's a strange kind of confirmation. The exact thing I'm describing as a relationship principle turns out to also be exactly what the technical infrastructure of email itself is built to measure. 

Earning attention isn't just the right way to think about a list. It's apparently baked into how the mail even gets delivered.

I'm not going to pretend I've fully arrived at this. Old habits don't disappear because I wrote an essay about them. Chasing the bigger number, feeling reassured by growth for its own sake, that pull is still there. But I notice the pull now, and noticing it is most of the battle.

What I can commit to is this. Every email I send from here forward gets judged by one question before it goes out. Does this earn the right to still be in someone's inbox next week, or am I just assuming it will be?

That's a higher bar than "did I send something." It's a fairer one, too, both to my readers and to the work itself.

It's not about growing the list. It's about earning the right to stay on it. Every subscriber I have left made that decision once already. My job now is to make sure they'd make it again.

© Copyright David Wakeman.  All Rights Reserved