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I need to tell you about the worst Sunday morning of my newsletter life.
I was sitting in church.
My phone buzzed.
I got distracted and snuck a look at my Beehiiv dashboard.
My subscriber count had dropped from 8,400+ to just 3,100.
WHAT HAPPENED?!
Turns out I fiddled too much with my automations…
I had accidentally set Beehiiv to auto-delete anyone who hadn't opened my emails in 30 days.
And when I took a hiatus from writing last year… my open rate dropped from 40%+ to 25%.
But I didn’t intend to wipe out 5000+ subscribers while doing it.
I felt sick.
SEO on your list now. Autopilot after setup
That SEO task that keeps getting pushed? AutoSEO handles it permanently. Articles, mentions, backlinks — running after setup without you touching it again. Over 2,500 small business owners went from "I'll get to it" to "it's already done."
The surprise I didn't expect
I spent a week sulking after.
But slowly, something strange happened.
My open rates shot up to 62.8%.
My email replies doubled. (You know who you are 😃)
Discovery calls started coming in more consistently.
And I realised: the 5k I lost were never really my people.
They were freebie-lovers.
Never opened a single email.
Never replied. Never booked a call.
They were just a vanity number inflating my fragile ego. (LOL)
The 3,100 who stayed? They're the real ones.
They open. They reply. They book calls.
They buy.
And you’re one of ‘em! (Love you!)
What I learned from this whole ordeal
Niching down your list feels like losing.
It's actually winning.
I’d pick 3.1k humans over 8.4k ghosts.
With the pressure off, I also experimented with daily emails.
This nurtured my leads so I literally 10x my discovery calls take rate.
So I'm fully content with where I am today.
— Justin
PS - If you want to build the same kind of passive nurturing system, the setup I use to automate lead gen and discovery calls — I use and recommend Beehiiv for it.
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