Finding the subscribers who have opened your emails

One of the important steps in this process is continuing to put the subscribers who have actually opened your emails into a specific group. This helps to drive up your open rates, which helps your emails to get into inboxes rather than spam folders.


Step 1 - Create a group

If you would like a step by step blog post for creating a group in Mailerlite then you can get that here.

If you think you can mostly figure it out for yourself great, but please when it comes to choosing a name do yourself a favour and create a specific, dated group name. Marketing is about collecting data, you will create many more groups in your future, use a specific name with a date. In this case I used Subscribers - opened email 2021.01.16 Why did I write the date backwards? Because when I put the list into alphabetical order I these lists will fall into chronological order.

Once you have created a group, click on All subscribers to find the people you are going to put into that group.


Step 2 - Order the subscribers from most to least opens

Now we need to group the subscribers by the people who have opened your emails, and the people who have not. Much like an Excel spreadsheet each of the headings on this screen can be used to order the information, if you click on “Open” it will order your subscribers from most opened to least opened. This is also really handy when you want to have a look through a larger list to find your hot leads.


Step 3 - Put subscribers into group

Now you can select people to enter into the Group that you created. If you have a larger list then you can probably select all of the first 50, or more, but scroll down to see if everyone on the page has opened an email (is there a number under Opens or does it have a zero?). if everyone on this page has actually opened an email (so the number is 1 or higher) then click on

This is another good example of why your group should have a really specific name, over time you will have more and more groups and adding people to groups will be difficult unless you have told yourself, in the group name, what this group is and what you are using it for.


Step 4 - unselect those who haven’t opened

At some point you will get to people who haven’t opened an email, perhaps that is on the first page, perhaps that is on a later page. Just unselect those who haven’t opened, or if it is quicker only select those who have opened (rather than using a select all function).

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Step 5 - create groups for the balance of people who didn’t open your email

This will seem odd, why am I putting them into groups? So that you can slowly move them into your ‘opened’ groups.

Use the Mailerlite filters to find those people who are not in the group that you just created.


Now what?

Now you can use this list as the base for your next email blast, and you can also add one of your other groupings (in my example either Group A, Group B or Group C) in order to potentially get some new subscribers opening your email. The higher open rate will increase the chance that these new people in your subgroups, who haven’t opened an email before, might open for the first time.

If you want more emails about setting up an email list then join my email list below.

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