Managing your subscribers on beehiiv

Effectively managing your newsletter subscribers is crucial for maintaining a clean and engaged email list. When too many subscribers aren’t interacting with your emails, it can negatively affect your newsletter metrics and deliverability.

You can easily remove unengaged subscribers from your list, both automatically and manually. While this article covers manually managing your audience, you can create a re-engagement campaign that proactively removes dormant subscribers. 

We'll start with some quick tips and resources to help you get started. Then, we'll walk through the steps to manually unsubscribe or delete a subscriber. Finally, we'll answer some frequently asked questions about managing subscribers.

Quick tips to get you started

• Each subscriber has a profile dashboard where you can access key data and manually manage their subscription from your account. 
• Subscribers can have 1 of 4 statuses, indicating their level of engagement with your publication. You can view this information in their subscriber profile dashboard.
• It’s best to set up a Subscriber Preference Center to manage and allow your subscribers to customize their preferences.
• Subscriber tags give you the ability to internally organize your subscribers, by tagging them based on certain criteria.
• You can export your subscriber list to a CSV file directly from your beehiiv account.
• Segments are a powerful tool that you can leverage to help you decide which subscribers to remove from your email list. 
  • For example, if a reader has unsubscribed or if you want to remove someone from your list, you can easily delete them using a segment. You can also create a segment specifically for readers who have unsubscribed.

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How to manually unsubscribe a subscriber

1. From the left panel Dashboard, click Audience > Subscribers.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Click on the subscriber you want to unsubscribe to access their personal dashboard.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. In the upper right corner, click Unsubscribe.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. You’ll be asked if you are sure you want to unsubscribe this subscriber from receiving your newsletter. Click Unsubscribe.
   
   
   

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How to delete a subscriber

1. From the left panel Dashboard, click Audience > Subscribers.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Click on the subscriber you want to unsubscribe to access their personal dashboard.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. In the upper right corner, click the down arrow icon next to the Unsubscribe button.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Click Delete.
   
   
   
   
   
   
5. You’ll be prompted to confirm if you want to permanently delete this subscriber, with a reminder that all associated data will be lost. To proceed, click Delete.
   
   
   

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Frequently asked questions about managing subscribers

Why don’t the numbers in my account dashboard match what I see in my Subscribers Report?

The subscriber numbers you see in your account dashboard upon logging in and the total number you see in your Subscribers Report are not expected to match because they represent different metrics, one shows the number of your active subscribers and the other showcases a tally of your new subscribers.

Account Dashboard: The Active Subscribers number you see on the Overview tab of your account dashboard represents the total number of active subscribers over the selected timeframe. This number specifically reflects those who are currently receiving your emails because they have confirmed their subscription and are not marked as Inactive.









Subscribers Report: The number of subscribers displayed in the Overview tab of your Subscribers Report represents the total number of New Subscribers within the selected timeframe, which includes a tally of Active, Inactive, Pending, and Validating subscribers. Learn more about subscriber status types here.









How should I find which disengaged users to remove from my list?
The first step in identifying disengaged users is to define what 'disengaged' means for your audience. Once you've set your criteria, you can create a segment to identify those subscribers. 
Some common examples of disengaged users to include in a segment:
• Open rate is 0% (or less than 5% in some cases)
• Open rate is less than 1/8 of the most recent emails
• Click-through rate is less than 1%