The Intent Cheat Sheet

The Generic Post Does Nothing In Particular

Pruning your email list is important. A smaller, engaged list often outperforms a larger, inactive one. Clean your list regularly for better results. Do you prune your list?

Technically about something. Accomplishes nothing in particular. Here's how it changes when you write for one specific outcome.

Drive Discussion Invite Disagreement

Shrinking your email list on purpose is the most underrated move in creator businesses.

I cut mine by 60% last month. Revenue went up. Nobody wants to admit this works because everyone's been taught the opposite for ten years.

Curious if anyone has tried this and regretted it. Or didn't try it and wishes they had.

Drive Engagement Hook With a Number

Deleted 8,400 people from my email list last month.

Revenue went up 34%.

Turns out most of a list is noise pretending to be an audience.

Educate Show the Mechanism

Most creators think list size is a vanity metric. It's worse than that. It's an actively misleading one.

Here's why. Inbox providers use engagement rate to decide whether your emails land in the inbox or the spam folder. A list full of people who never open is teaching Gmail that you're noise. Every dead subscriber is pulling your live ones toward spam.

When I cut my unengaged subscribers, my open rate doubled. Not because the remaining readers suddenly cared more. Because the ones who cared were finally seeing the email.

The takeaway: list size only matters relative to engagement rate. Below a certain engagement floor, subtracting people is how you reach more of them.

Soft Promote a Product Let the Work Speak

Spent an afternoon last week building a thing I needed: a sweep that finds subscribers who haven't opened in 90 days and quietly archives them.

Ran it on my own list and deleted 60% of it. Open rate went from 18% to 41%. Revenue per send went up too, which I did not expect.

I'm adding it to [Product] as a one-click tool this month. Mostly building it for me, but it's been strange watching the same thing happen every time I test it on someone else's list.

Drive Conversions One Ask, No Noise

Your email list is probably too big.

If your open rate is under 25%, you're paying a provider to deliver to people who aren't listening, and the silence is dragging the rest of your list into spam.

I built a tool that finds and clears dead subscribers in one pass. Most people see open rates jump within a week.

[Run the free scan ->]

Takes 2 minutes. Works on lists up to 100k. No setup.