The notice appears as a banner across the top of the dashboard: you’ve reached your contact limit, and the account won’t send another campaign until you upgrade or trim the list. For a bakery that collects addresses on a clipboard by the till, or a yoga studio that adds each new student after their first class, it means nobody on the list hears from the shop, including anyone who signed up since that banner appeared.
Upgrading the plan you’re already on is the easy option, but have a look at what else is out there first. If your free account sits with Klaviyo, a comparison of klaviyo alternatives is worth reading before you enter card details, because it sets out what each platform charges at 500, 2,500 and 10,000 contacts. Most paid email plans charge by the number of contacts on the list, so you pay every month for each address you keep.
How to tidy your list before you pay for it
Every address counts towards the price, including ones that bounce and ones belonging to customers who’ve long since moved away. Before upgrading, export your contacts as a spreadsheet and sort them by the date each person last opened or clicked anything.
Hard bounces go first. These are addresses that no longer exist, and most platforms flag them for you in the contact list. Next come the people who haven’t opened a single email in a year or more. Send them one short message asking whether they’d like to stay, with a plain button to confirm, and remove anyone who hasn’t pressed it within a fortnight.
A cleaner list also means fewer of your emails land in spam. Alongside Microsoft’s requirements for bulk senders to Outlook addresses, its guidance recommends two habits: remove invalid addresses regularly, to cut bounces and spam complaints, and give readers an easy, clearly visible way to opt out. The rules only apply to senders of more than 5,000 emails a day, so a shop newsletter is well under the line. Outlook and the other mail providers still filter your emails, though. Put the unsubscribe link where a reader spots it in a second; anyone who can’t find it is left with the spam button, and that click counts as a complaint.
What your welcome email needs to say
When someone signs up at the counter on a Tuesday morning and you’re on a free setup with no automation, they hear nothing from the shop until the next newsletter goes out, three weeks later if that’s how often you send.
Look for a plan that sends a welcome email automatically the moment someone joins, from the form on your website or the tablet at the counter. Keep that email short. Sign it with your own first name, the one regulars already use when they pay. Say what the newsletter will carry and how often it’ll arrive, then give one reason to come in this week: the loaf that’s only baked on Fridays, the rail of new stock, the evening class with spaces left. Put the unsubscribe link in the footer next to your opening hours and address. Set the footer up once and it carries over to every email.
Some shops serve two quite separate groups, such as walk-in customers and people who book workshops. Add one question to the sign-up form and send each group its own version of the welcome. Paid tools do this with a tag or a segment, and the number of segments each plan includes is one of the lines to compare when you’re weighing up options.
Photo: Christin Hume / Unsplash
Sending event invitations to part of your list
Invitations to a supper club, a trunk show or a Saturday workshop with a handful of places are best sent to the people who’ve booked something before, or who ticked “events” on the sign-up form, rather than to the whole list. Send them early enough for them to plan around it. Check whether each plan lets you schedule an email for a set date and time, and whether it can send a reminder only to the people who didn’t open the first one.
Which numbers to read in your reports
Of all the charts a paid tool offers, three matter: opens, clicks and unsubscribes.
Open rates are the one to take with a pinch of salt. Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads email images in the background for iPhone and Mac users who switch it on, so an email shows as opened whether or not anyone read it. Clicks are harder to fake, because a person has to tap a link. For a sense of scale, the Data & Marketing Association’s UK email benchmarking report for 2025 put the average open rate at 35.9 per cent and the unique click rate at 2.3 per cent across 2024, using data from seven UK email service providers.
Compare your own click rate with that second figure, and then look at which link people pressed: the booking page, the new stock, the map. That tells you what to put at the top of the next email. If unsubscribes jump after one particular send, open that email again and look at what it offered.
Once your list is clean and you know your numbers, the shortlist gets shorter. Monthly billing is the safer choice while the list is still growing fast, and an annual plan at today’s contact count, where the tool offers one, makes sense once growth settles.
