Hey, it's Pavel.
In today's issue:
Why your next ESP savings opportunity might already be sitting in your subscriber list.
A nine-step approach to cutting billable contacts without blindly deleting potential customers.
How to tell the difference between an inactive audience and a deliverability problem.
Why a smaller list can leave room for new leads without forcing another plan upgrade.
DEEP DIVE
Your ESP has increased its prices. Prioritize subscribers who are genuinely interested in your emails.
Beehiiv announced new plans and pricing this month. If you’re a current customer, these changes take effect at your first renewal on or after 1 November 2026. Prices can increase on any email platform. So, what should you do when your costs rise?
You might consider switching platforms. But if your automations run smoothly, your team knows the system well, and your lead magnets bring in new subscribers, starting over to save money could cause more hassle than it’s worth.
Start with a simpler question: Who are you still paying for?
Some subscribers may have stopped opening, clicking, buying, or responding months ago but still count toward your billing tier. This doesn’t mean deleting everyone who seems unengaged. Instead, you need a way to decide who stays, who deserves another chance, and who should stop receiving your emails.
"The goal isn't to build the smallest list. It's to stop paying indefinitely for an audience you no longer have a relationship with."
Here’s how I would handle this.
1. Find out what would actually lower your bill
Review your ESP invoice and check three points: what is billable, your current tier limits, and what would change if you moved to a lower tier.
Some platforms charge by subscriber bands, others by the number of sends, contact records, features, or a combination. (2026 Q2 Email Marketing Pricing Report, n.d.) With a tiered system, deleting 1,000 contacts won't lower your bill if you stay in the same band, but it will give you room to increase usage before upgrading.
For instance, beehiiv's Lite tier allows up to 10,000 subscribers for $139 a month. With the full tier, the cost is about $0.0139 per subscriber, but your bill doesn't decrease by that amount each time someone unsubscribes. (beehiiv Launches New Plans and Pricing (October 2026), 2026)
Campaign suppression and billing status are not the same thing. (The suppression list, 2026)
Before making any changes, check how your ESP handles records that are unsubscribed, archived, or inactive.ve for 12 months
If you send regularly, start with contacts on the list for at least a year who received emails during that time and have neither a recorded open nor a click in the last 12 months.
Use AND betweeUse AND between those last two engagement conditions. Someone who reads without clicking differs from someone with no tracked interaction.g, check for signals outside the newsletter: purchases, account activity, replies, identifiable website visits, or paid subscriptions. Current customers may need a different communication policy. Necessary service messages should not be treated like promotional emails.
Make sure you have the relevant history too. If you migrated your ESP three months ago without importing engagement data, your new dashboard won't show someone inactive for a year. If you stopped sending messages for several months, readers may not have had a fair chance to engage.
3. Don't treat opens as proof of interest
Open tracking isn't always reliable. For example, Apple Mail Privacy Protection and image prefetching can show an email was opened even if no one read it. Conversely, image blocking can hide genuine opens, and security software may sometimes generate false clicks. (Braedon, 2026)
Whenever possible, focus on genuine actions like filtered human clicks, replies, purchases, meaningful product use, and clear subscription confirmations. The best indicators vary by content. For example, if all information is in the email, don't judge readers only by how often they click through to your website.
"An open should be regarded as a clue rather than as a verdict."
4. Give the right audience a limited chance to reconnect
For those suitable for reactivation, I would send a short sequence over two to three weeks, consisting of up to three emails:
Say hello again, remind them what they agreed to, and ask whether they still want to receive your emails.
Make the value clear by sharing one actual useful idea or resource that matches what you are sending today.
Finish the loop; state clearly when you'll cease sending them if they don't confirm, and then actually do it.
Remove individuals from the sequence as soon as they confirm withdrawal, unsubscribe, complain, or hard bounce. A real reply or explicit confirmation works better than an automated one.
This does not mean sending three additional emails to each old address. For contacts who haven't heard from you in a year, wide-scale reactivation might be too risky. In such cases, direct suppression could be safer. When testing, start with a small group of eligible contacts and monitor complaints or delivery failures.
A final chance is provided to renew the relationship, not a chance to keep sending emails forever.
5. Retire the contacts who remain unresponsive
If a person ignores regular campaigns, shows no other significant activity, and doesn't respond to a final invitation, stop sending routine marketing. Unsubscribe, suppression, or archive option to stop future promotional emails and reduce your billable contacts, if your email provider allows it. Keep records so you don't accidentally re-import or resubscribe these contacts, and to avoid compliance problems later.
Switching unresponsiSwitching unresponsive contacts to a cheaper email provider doesn't solve the issue. You're just paying someone else to keep emailing them.to-twelve-month audience next
Once you've handled the oldest inactive contacts, look at those who haven't engaged in six to twelve months. Instead of removing them immediately, pause regular emails to this group while reviewing their status.
Analyze your list by mailbox provider. Check Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and Hotmail separately. Include business addresses from services like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 if you can identify them. Compare the number of inactive users to your total audience for each provider. Just knowing how many inactive Gmail users you have isn't helpful if most of your list uses Gmail.
Look at trends in clicks, replies, bounces, deferrals, and complaints. Review where your contacts came from and how they move through your email flows. Are people who signed up for a lead magnet getting emails that don't match what they wanted? Are automated promotions still going out long after someone converted or stopped engaging?
7. Separate lost interest from lost delivery
This difference is important. If some people stopped engaging because your emails went to spam, treating them all as uninterested could mean losing subscribers you might have brought back.
Watch for sudden changes with each mailbox provider. Check SMTP errors, authentication issues, complaint trends, and provider-specific reports. Google Postmaster Tools covers only personal Gmail accounts, so use Yahoo, Microsoft, and your ESP's reports for those providers. (Set up Postmaster Tools, 2026)
If people truly seem uninterested, try a reactivation campaign, then remove those who remain inactive. If the problem is delivery, fix that first before trying to win them back.
A better-looking open rate after cleanup can be just denominator math.
A higher open rate alone doesn't mean more people actually saw your emails in their inbox.
8. Make room for the subscribers arriving today
Imagine your ESP bills for 10,000 active subscribers. After a careful audit and cleanup, you remove 3,000 contacts who no longer have a meaningful relationship with your newsletter.
Now you have 7,000 billable subscribers. Depending on your provider's pricing, you might move to a cheaper plan or keep your current plan and add 3,000 new subscribers before upgrading.
This is just an example, not an actual client result or a guaranteed saving.
You don't need to stop using lead magnets or close signup forms. Instead, focus on what happens after someone signs up: send the promised resource, explain what emails they'll get next, and customize onboarding based on their reason for subscribing.
Someone whSomeone who downloaded a migration checklist likely needs a different follow-up email than a person interested in newsletter sponsorships.l saving isn't always a lower invoice this month. Sometimes it's another 3,000 new leads before you need to pay for the next tier."
9. Make list hygiene an ongoing decision, not an annual panic
Twelve months is a good starting point for reviewing an old list, but it is not a one-size-fits-all rule. Your email frequency, sales cycle, and relationship with your audience should guide your policy.
Check inactive groups every month. Decide when to remove people from regular emails, when to try reactivation, what shows renewed interest, and when to stop sending altogether.
Before your next billing cycle, make sure you don't bill retired contacts and needed plan changes. Track savings or extra capacity. Also, check for unused seats, features you don't need, overlapping tools, and annual billing options.
If switching email providers still saves money, bring your suppression history, double-check your new setup, and slowly increase sending volume.
THAT’S A WRAP
Before you go: 3 ways I can help
Deliverability audit. A full review of your setup, list health and platform costs, with a written action plan.
Platform cost review. I compare your current plan against three alternatives sized to your real sending.
Until next time,
Pavel