Bigger Is Rarely Better

One of the most common mistakes I've seen in email marketing is an obsession with list size, especially among executives. The thinking goes like this: "The bigger the list, the more success I'll have." It sounds logical. In practice, a bigger list built the wrong way does more damage than a smaller list of people who actually respond.

A contact who never asked to hear from you is a liability

A large list is only valuable if the people on it want to hear from you. If you're adding contacts who haven't opted in, you're setting yourself up to fail. They're more likely to ignore it, unsubscribe, or mark it as spam. Every one of those outcomes counts against you, and spam complaints in particular cost far more in reputation than the contact was ever worth.¹ Enough of them, and your mail gets filtered before it reaches anyone, including the people who did want it.

A small engaged list outperforms a large indifferent one

A small list of people who click, buy, and come back will consistently beat a large list of people who don't.² Those subscribers are your actual audience. The rest are a number on a dashboard.

The idea that you can make up for low engagement with high volume is outdated and dangerous. If your plan depends on sending massive volumes to get a handful of responses, you're playing a numbers game that the math doesn't support.³ You burn out the list, and you teach mailbox providers that most of your recipients don't want your mail. Relevance gets better results than reach.

Measure the people who respond

So what should you measure? Clicks, conversions, and complaint rates tell you whether your mail is landing with the people receiving it.⁴ Opens used to be a strong signal, but machine-generated opens have made them much weaker. If your response metrics are improving, you are on the right track, regardless of list size.

List size is a vanity metric. It is easy to grow and easy to brag about, and on its own it tells you nothing about whether anyone is listening.