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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe most people when they claim they get 50%+ consistently.

I'm only one person, and not "most", and I don't want to share my latest data for commercial reasons but here's my open and click rates for all of my campaigns in September straight from the MailChimp's mouth: http://no.gd/openrates.jpg - these went out to a total of around 78k subscribers (software developers, specifically) each week.

Are most people lying though? I'm not so sure but the real proof of the pudding is in how much traffic they drive to you if you're in their newsletter somehow.

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I can also vouch for that for Peter's list and all the other lists that are over the 50% mark in the graph on my blog post. Quite frankly, it IS HARD to get this high of an open rate. Peter and all the other publishers who are able to do it consistently are somewhat of an anomaly.

That said, another way I've seen this done is I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening. And, this will give you a much higher concentration of people who consistently open...

I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening.

Aha! Makes sense. Especially if these publishers offer email marketing as a service to other publishers.

I remember hearing that before long ago but it slipped my mind. Thanks.

This also has the side effect of making your email list have better deliverability. If you consistently have good open rates, Gmail and other email providers tend to mark your content as spam less often.

Mailchimp recommends [1] pruning out inactive or "low star" members semi-regularly for this reason.

[1] http://blog.mailchimp.com/segmenting-your-email-campaign-bas...

As a note, I have not done any of this yet. I think it's a good idea but I'm stuck in between the HN "growth!" and a personal "quality!" mindset.

Reaching 100k subscribers is my Everest so I hope I can start pruning slowly once it crosses that psychological threshold ;-)

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