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There’s a particular satisfaction in watching your email list number climb. You add a new freebie, you run a promotion, and the count ticks up. Fifty subscribers becomes two hundred. A thousand becomes two thousand. It feels like progress, and in a way, it is.
But a big list isn’t the number worth chasing, even though it might feel really nice. If those people don’t engage, never open, never click, and barely remember signing up, they are not adding anything to your list. They are actually working against it.
This post is about the gap between an impressive list size and a list that actually does something for your business. I’m not going to tell you size never matters, because sometimes it genuinely does, and I’ll show you where. But if your list has been growing while everything else stays flat, the size might be the very thing holding you back.
The big number feels good, and wanting it is human
Let’s be honest about something first. A bigger number is nice. When you cross a round figure, whether that is a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand subscribers, it feels amazing. Like you’ve made it. And yes, I feel it too. 😊
And it doesn’t matter what size your list is, because the pull is the same. If you have fifty people, you’d love a hundred. If you have thirty thousand, you catch yourself eyeing fifty. The specific number changes. The wanting doesn’t.
I work with people right across that range. Some have 20 subscribers, some have a few thousand, and some have 50.000 and climbing. Every one of them, at some point, has wanted the number to be bigger. That isn’t vanity to be ashamed of. It’s human, it’s normal, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying it.
The trouble begins when that number becomes more important than having an engaged list. A big number made of people who don’t care isn’t an achievement. It’s how you lose touch with the people that do want to hear from you. And how you end up with one of those usually comes down to how you grew the list in the first place.
That is also why it’s worth knowing which numbers actually matter and which ones don’t. I wrote about which metrics to track and how in detail here.
The fastest way to grow a list is usually the wrong one
I spoke to a business owner recently who was spending a lot on ads to grow his list. It was working, in the sense that the numbers were working. A few hundred new subscribers were coming in every day. Then he stopped and said something honest. He’d set out to build a community, and what he’d actually built was a big list. He also admitted, with a bit of a laugh, that he still gets a thrill watching the number climb.
There’s nothing wrong with ads, or giveaways, or any of the faster ways to grow. But speed and connection rarely go together. When someone swaps their email address for a prize, or gets swept up in an ad on a quiet evening, they haven’t chosen you yet. They’ve chosen the thing in front of them. Some of those people will stick around and warm up over time. Plenty will never open a single email.
My whole approach to marketing is built on circles rather than funnels. Normally, the people on your email list sit in the trust circle. They’re paying attention, they’re interested in what you do, and they’ve chosen to keep hearing from you. That’s what having someone’s email address usually means.
The people who arrive through fast growth are the odd exception. They’re on your list, but they aren’t in the trust circle yet. They haven’t really got to know you, and you haven’t yet earned their attention. Sitting there among everyone else they look like subscribers, but they’re closer to strangers who happened to hand over an email address. To bring them in properly they need a deliberate warm up, a different welcome from the one you’d give someone who went looking for you and chose you on purpose. If funnels have never quite worked for you, this is the thinking behind why I use marketing circles instead.
When a bigger list starts to cost you
You might wonder why you should care. Isn’t having a big list just plain fun? But a pile of subscribers who never open your emails doesn’t just sit there harmlessly. It actively makes your emails perform worse for everyone else who does want to hear from you.
Email providers like Gmail and Outlook watch how people respond to you. When a big chunk of your list never opens, never clicks, and every so often marks you as spam, those providers start to assume your emails aren’t really wanted. So they tuck you into the promotions tab, or the spam folder, for everyone. Including the people who genuinely want to read your emails. The dead weight drags down delivery for the enthusiastic fans.
And then there is the simpler problem: cost. You pay for your list. Most email platforms charge by the number of subscribers, so every person who never opens is a person you’re paying to keep.
So how do you know if this is happening to you? You don’t need special tools, you need to look at the trend rather than the total. If your list has grown over the last year but your open rate has slid down, that’s your sign. A small drop can be expected if your numbers have grown exponentially but if you’ve doubled your subscribers and halved your open rate, something is wrong.
Yes, sometimes the number really does open a door
I don’t want to bash anyone for chasing the bigger number, because it does come in handy sometimes. A while ago, I wanted to join a summit, the kind where a group of people all do a presentation and they all promote that shared event to all of their audiences at once. To take part, you needed at least 3.000 subscribers. I didn’t have them, so I couldn’t join.
And the honest part is that I could have got in. I clean my list automatically, so people who stop opening quietly drop off. If I’d switched that cleaning off, I’d have been sitting comfortably above 3.000, maybe closer to 5.000, and the door would have opened.
Look at what that actually means. A list of 5.000 people barely opening anything, running at maybe a 5% open rate, would have been welcomed in. My real list, a little over a thousand people with an open rate of around 43%, was turned away. The version of me that could reach far more engaged readers was the one left standing outside, because the entry rule counted heads, not attention.
So yes, size can be a literal gate. Some opportunities do put a number on the door, and if you’re under it you’re out, however engaged your people are. That part is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
That is the whole problem in miniature. Even the people setting the bar were counting the vanity number. I could have qualified in about thirty seconds by simply not cleaning my list, and I chose not to. I would rather have a little over a thousand people who genuinely want to hear from me than five thousand who unlock a door and then do nothing once I’m through it. Because if they allow that for me, what is the value of those other speakers lists? Would those people actually want to hear from them?
Who knows? Maybe sometime I will start a summit where I don’t ask for subscriber numbers but for your open rate… 🤷🏼♀️
What an engaged list actually looks like
So what does an engaged list actually look like? People open your emails because they recognise your name and want to hear what you have to say. They reply. They click through to the things you point them to. They show up, and they buy when the moment is right for them. You send something out, and something genuinely happens on the other side. That back and forth is the whole point, and it’s worth far more than a big number that never moves.
If reading this has made you suspect your own list is carrying some dead weight, that’s genuinely good news. It means there’s a group of real, interested people in there, currently hidden behind everyone who stopped opening months ago. You don’t have to choose between the two. You can gently clear out the ones who’ve gone without touching the ones who still want you. I’ve written a separate guide on how to clean your list without losing subscribers who still care, so I won’t repeat all of it here.
And if you’re not even sure what state your list is in, and you’re on Kit, that’s exactly what a Kit Account Audit is for. I go through your account properly, your tags, your automations, your sending habits, and give you an honest picture of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to deal with first. Often just seeing it clearly is enough to know your next move.
But whether you audit it, clean it, or simply start paying closer attention, the shift that matters most is the one in your head. Stop asking how big your list is. Start asking how many of those people would notice if you stopped emailing tomorrow. That smaller number, the people who would actually miss you, is the one worth growing. It’s almost always tinier than your total, but it’s worth so much more.
