It’s widely acknowledged that a well-maintained email list is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of a digital marketer. Nearly all online businesses at some point set about compiling a list of subscribers, but a very large proportion of these lists fall into disuse. Whether it’s through sketchy forward planning, a shortage of content ideas, or simply because of other competing pressures of business, it’s all too easy to let an email database fall cold and dormant through lack of sending activity.<\/p>\n
However, there may come a time when you decide to resume newsletter marketing, and your thoughts will probably turn to your old list that’s been gathering virtual cobwebs over the months.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, suddenly sending a sales email to a cold list is only asking for trouble. You’ll confuse your recipients, many of whom won’t remember signing up to your list in the first place. At best, this will result in few sales and a hefty bunch of unsubscribes. At worst, your email will be widely seen as unsolicited, resulting in spam reports and reputational damage.<\/p>\n
Luckily, with a little care, a cold email list can be brought back to life so as not to waste this valuable asset. Here’s how to do it.<\/p>\n
phpList keeps a record of when each of your list members first subscribed. You can use this to filter out your most recent subscribers, for whom your brand will still be a fresh memory. There’s no need to include these still-warm subscribers in your revival project, so strip them out of your recipient list for this particular broadcast.<\/p>\n
You now need to put together a message specifically for your older, colder subscribers that will hopefully bring a high proportion of them back into the fold. This warm-up message should include the following elements:<\/p>\n
After sending this warm-up email, let things settle for a week or two. You will undoubtedly receive a fair number of unsubscription requests, but this is only natural when sending to a dated list. Be assiduous in actioning these requests. Your aim is to clean up your list leaving only willing members, and there’s little point in being precious about the size of your final tally.<\/p>\n
Once it seems that unsubscription activity has tailed off, you can resume normal newsletter operations with more commercially oriented messages, confident that you’ve done all you can to avoid accusations of spam.<\/p>\n
If you want to be absolutely certain that subscribers want to remain on your lists you can ask them to opt-in to future communications. phpList makes this easy by providing a draft campaign that’s ready to go: simply visit