👋 Today, we're digging into why deleting most of your email list might be the best thing you do for ad sales this year.

Counterintuitive list paradoxes aside, let's dive in! 🚀

Delete Subscribers. Make More Money.

🥅 The number sponsors actually care about

When a media buyer looks at your newsletter, the first thing they want to know isn't how many people are on your list. It's whether their campaign is going to work.

Campaign performance drives renewals. Renewals drive rate increases. Good data leads to a renewal, a renewal lets you raise rates, and that compounding cycle is how newsletter ad businesses scale. A bloated list with 20% open rates breaks that cycle at step one. The campaign underperforms, the sponsor doesn't come back, and you're starting from scratch every quarter.

I’ve been there. It’s an uphill slog.

A 60% open rate on 220k is a fundamentally different sales conversation than 8% on 1.4 million. The engaged list has better CPMs, better click data to show in post-campaign reports, and a renewal story. The inflated list has a bigger headline number and not much else.

I JUST spoke to a local newsletter that’s doing ~$300k a year (I guess conservatively), of a little more than 40k subscribers. He’d signed a $70k+ deal. Of course, it came from repeat business.

🎯 This isn't just a newsletter problem

The same dynamic plays out across every attention-based business, and nowhere more visibly than influencer marketing.

Mega-influencers (1M+ followers) average 1.21% engagement on Instagram. Micro-influencers, typically 10k to 100k followers, average 3.86%. That's not a small gap. It's the difference between an audience that's there and an audience that's paying attention.

73% of brands now say they prefer working with micro or mid-tier creators specifically because of the engagement-to-cost ratio.

One study put the ROI on micro-influencer spend at $5.20 for every dollar, because the audience is smaller, tighter, and actually listens. Back to newsletters, a 58% open rate on 50k is worth more to a sponsor than 20% on 200k.

🔧 What to do about it

The practical lessons of this is simple, just uncomfortable. I’m not a boots on the ground growth guy, but..

Run a re-engagement campaign. Anyone who hasn't opened in 90 days gets one email, something like "Still want to hear from us?" No open, no click, they're gone.

It's painful for about a week and pays off indefinitely: deliverability improves, open rates improve, your post-campaign reports start looking like something you'd actually want to show a sponsor. Not anxiety-inducing.

Another publisher that I know did a proper list clean saw open rates jump 62% and doubled revenue in the following year, at least in part due to the clean. Not because they got more readers. Because the readers they had actually started performing.

The goal isn't the biggest list. It’s the highest quality impressions and best performing campaigns.

Which all stems from… GOOD CONTENT.

🤯 Another (dramatic example)

I spoke with a 12-year-old digital media company this week. They’re site and newsletter focused. After being sold twice, they’ve recently chopped their list down from 1.4 MILLION to 220k.

Campaigns are performing, clicks are verified, and they are investing in (quality) growth again.

Not saying you need to be that dramatic. But…

Write good **** and clean your ******* list.

Thanks.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps new media companies do just that.