84 | What to do if you’ve ghosted your email list
What To Do if You’ve Ghosted Your Email List
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Have you been neglecting your email list for a little while? Are you wondering whether it’s possible to revive an old email list? Well, the answer is YES! In this episode, you’ll learn how to re-engage your email subscribers and how to avoid ghosting your list again in the future. Plus, I’m breaking down the 3-part email sequence you should send to revive your email list.
LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
🔗 FREE: 18 Ways to Grow Your Audience Through Collaboration
🔗 Revive Your Email List Email Sequence
🔗 Liz Wilcox’s $9 email membership (aff link)
want to listen instead?
If you’ve got an email list that’s looking a little dusty and hasn’t received much love or attention from you in a while, you’re not alone. A lot of solopreneurs struggle to keep on top of their email lists when they’re busy prioritising client work, creating new offers and trying to keep up with all the new updates and features on social media.
You might be wondering if it’s even possible to revive a neglected email list, or if you should just start over from scratch. Let me tell you: It is absolutely possible to bring your email list back to life. But you need to start now. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be.
Why bother re-engaging an old email list?
But first, let’s talk about why you should re-engage your old email list instead of just starting a new one.
1. You’ve already dedicated time & hard work into growing your list.
Whether you’ve built an email list that used to be engaged, but you’ve just let it collect dust over the past few months, or you’ve just collected a few emails from various lead magnets and checkout pages - you’ve already put the effort in to collect those emails. Don’t let your hard work be for nothing.
2. Unsubscribes don’t matter
When you begin to re-engage your list, you will inevitably receive some unsubscribes. This is a good thing, because you’re weeding out the people who weren’t going to be interested in receiving your emails anyway, whether that’s because they’re no longer interested in the topic you help people with or because they’ve already achieved the goal they were working towards or for some other reason… you don’t need them on your list anymore.
What does matter are the people who stay. These are going to be your hottest leads because they’re saying that even though they haven’t heard from you in a while, they’re excited you’re back and want to stay for more!
3 emails you need to send to re-engage & revive your email list
If you haven’t emailed your list in a while, your main goal is to get people interested in your content and opening your emails again. You’ll also want them to engage with your emails by clicking on links and replying to you.
To do this, I recommend sending out a series of 3 emails, over the course of a week, that encourages your audience to open and engage with you. If you would like this email series pre-written for you, so that all you have to do is fill in the blanks, you can purchase my Revive Your List Email Sequence.
Here’s an overview of the 3-part email sequence for you to send:
Email #1: Acknowledge your absence
I don’t recommend trying to slide back into their inbox like nothing happened. Acknowledging your absence can actually help you connect more with your audience.
In this email, I recommend including...
A picture of you, or a recognisable brand image
A brief paragraph acknowledging that you’ve been MIA - be honest, if you’ve simply been busy and neglected your email list, just say that! You can even make a joke of it
A re-introduction of yourself and a reminder of who you are and what you do
A free resource related to what you help your audience with that they can download and get a quick win from
Email #2: Guage their interests
A few days later, you can send your second email, which will serve to remind your audience of the different ways you can help them. It will also help you identify where your subscribers interests lie and segment your list so that you’re sending relevant emails to your subscribers.
For example, if you’re a money coach, you might cover both business and personal finance. In this email, you can give your subscribers the option to choose whether they receive emails on just one of these financial topics or both!
This can also apply if you have ideal clients within different stages of their journey. For example, if you’re a podcast manager then you may have ideal clients who haven’t started their podcasting journey yet, those who have started and are looking to grow but want to do it themselves, and those who are really looking to scale and potentially hire a podcast manager. These can all be separate buttons that your audience can click to identify which point in their journey they’re at.
You’ll want to create different buttons based on the topics you cover or ideal clients you serve, and then when a subscriber clicks on a button they’re automatically tagged in your email system so that you can segment those subscribers to only receive emails based on their interests.
Email #3: Let them know what to expect & invite them to unsubscribe
In your third and final email, you can lay out what your subscribers can expect from you going forward. If you’re going to be sending them weekly emails (which I highly recommend you do), let them know! You can also share some of the topics you’ll be emailing them about over the coming months so that they have a better idea of what they can expect from being on your list.
At this point, I would also invite them to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in receiving your emails. While it’s great to have a big list, more subscribers mean nothing if they’re not engaged.
Remember to clean your list regularly
A few days after you finish sending your email list revival sequence, head to your email service provider and identify the subscribers who didn’t open any of those 3 emails. Rather than removing these emails straight away, I recommend adding them to a group or segment so that you can keep an eye on them over the next few weeks.
If they don’t open any of your emails over the next 3 weeks, you can unsubscribe them to clean up your lists. If they do begin to open your emails, however, you can remove them from that list and do a little happy dance for successfully re-engaging them!
How to avoid ghosting your list again
Now that you’ve successfully re-engaged your list, you want to keep on top of it and make sure that you don’t ghost them again! Otherwise, all that hard work will have been for nothing.
A few tips to help you do this:
1. Commit to an email cadence that works for you
Don’t try and email 3 times per week if you know you’re going to struggle to commit to that. I recommend email your list at least once a week so that your audience get used to you and look forward to your emails. Any less and you’ll likely have the whole “who’s this again? Unsubscribe.” when you send your emails.
2. Set a regular day of the week to send emails
Consistency is key. When you send your emails on the same day each week, not only do you become a part of your audience’s routine, you establish your own content routine which makes it easier for you to set aside time for you to create and schedule those emails.
3. Batch your emails
If emailing consistently is something you struggle with, set aside a few hours at the start of the month to create a plan for your emails for the month ahead. Then, you can write them all out and schedule them at once so that you don’t have to think about it until next month.
4. Join an email marketing membership
If you struggle with what to send your list, there are various memberships that offer fill-in-the-blank email templates that you can use to send your emails. Although I don’t personally use one of these, I’ve heard great things about Liz Wilcox’s $9 email membership (aff link).
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hey, I'm Tish!
I'm a multi-passionate business owner, digital marketing strategist, business mentor & part-time digital nomad ✈️
I'm on a mission to help you create more time, freedom & profit in your business through the implementation of sustainable & scalable business and marketing strategies!
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The Simple Marketing Podcast is for ambitious entrepreneurs who want to build a sustainable & scalable online business. With bite-sized, actionable episodes, you’ll learn how to create more time, freedom & profit in a way that feels good to you.
