After careful considerations and endless hours of writing killer drafts and attention-seeking headlines, you’re confident that you’ve finally crafted the perfect emails for your next campaign.
However, the data from your previous campaigns don’t seem to resonate the same confidence.
Your open, clickthrough and engagement rates have gone cold, they send shivers down Jon Snow’s spine.
But all hope is not lost. There are plenty of smart and easy ways you can heat up your list again. Stick around and discover the best 8 ways to build hype with your next email campaigns and warm your cold email list’s hearts.
Before you proceed with the actual creation of re-engagement emails, do these email homeroom duties first:
1. Search and segment your cold subscribers
Evaluate your list for inactive email subscribers. These are people who haven’t clicked, opened, responded, or did anything with your emails for the past 6-12 months.
When you’ve found them, you can send them into a new segment. You can create specific segments for the cold ones based on their lifestyle, preferences, and more, to serve them a more personalized set of emails.
Patrick: What if we take your inactive, cold subscribers, and push it somewhere else?
2. Clean your list
It’s hard to let go of some subscribers from your list, but if you don’t see any potential anymore, then don’t hold back. You’re wasting time and resources with them.
One good way to trim your list is to ask your subscribers directly. Send them an email asking if they’re still interested to receive emails from you. Then, you can remove those who’ve responded from your list.
You can also clear invalid email addresses from your list. These invalid addresses usually appear when you run contests or giveaways that require signing up with an email ad. To gain entry, most usually enter a non-existential email ad or an address with wrong formats.
To purge these invalids out of your list, you can use an email verification service. The email verifier will scan and remove these invalid ones out of your list.
This process also prevents invalid email addresses from entering your list during sign-up. A potential subscriber receives a real-time alert when they’ve entered an email address in a wrong format.
3. Review your sending schedules
Google can tell you different answers for “best time to send emails,” but the only way to know which time/s work for you is to test them yourself.
You can try launching a short email campaign with a new set of schedules. Create two trial segments, one with your recent active subscribers, and one with some of the cold ones. Keep testing until you find the optimal time for your emails.
Or you can skip the hustle-bustle of this method and ask your subscribers which time they prefer to receive emails on your FB page or group, or on any of your social media accounts with plenty of active followers.
Now that those are out of the way, you can jump at these 5 ways to re-engage your subscribers:
4. Offer something exclusive
Exclusive offers to people in your cold list show that you still value them despite their lack of engagement with you. Even if there are hundreds or thousands of active subscribers hoping for the same offer, you chose to extend your offer to them.
Your exclusive offers can range from small discounts, free shipping vouchers, or a one-week trial of your product. The idea is to encourage them to try you out by making your offer more enticing for them.
5. Ask them their preferences
Perhaps some of your inactive subscribers prefer a different way of communication. Some might be expecting a certain type of email from you, like a weekly curation of articles.
Instead of guessing around, why not ask them directly about it? You can send them survey forms through email with a promise of incentives in exchange. The incentives can be anything as long as it’s relevant to your audience and business and provides value for their time to answer.
6. Check your personalization elements
Don’t generalize your offers or content on email. No matter how similar your subscribers’ interests are, they still differ in terms of lifestyle, finances, and personal preferences.
You can send your different segments different personalized recommendation emails each. One good way is to integrate Facebook’s Custom Audience with your email campaign. Just upload your mailing list on the Ads Editor, and launch your campaign targeted for that list. This helps you reach out to people active on FB, but not on your emails.
You can also send emails on their birthdays and special holidays or occasions you think are important or interesting to them. Include gifts in your emails too.
7. Give them a gentle reminder
Some inactive subscribers might still be interested in your emails and/or offers, but they don’t have enough time to remember reading your emails. To determine if this is the case, you can send them a “reminder” email. In this email, you can:
- Confirm with them if they’re actually receiving your emails from you
- Ask them if they want to change the way they receive emails or to opt-out of your list
- Encourage them to leave feedback and suggestions
- Remind them to continue where they left off, like the way Alison does when you haven’t taken any courses in a long period:
8. Do a little guilt trip
If the gentle reminder didn’t work, give them the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Show them they’re losing out on great things because of their lack of activity. Share with them how many people have experienced life-changing improvements by just sticking or actively engaging with you on email.
Duolingo uses this strategy best for users who’ve been inactive with their language lessons on their app. Here’s an example of how they do it:
The final road
Remember, people in your cold email list aren’t as warm and fuzzy as your active ones. It takes a little more hard work to bring them to life again, but when you catch the perfect rekindling formula, you’ll see that it’s all worth it.
So keep experimenting and analyzing your campaigns’ data, and practice these 8 ways to keep your email marketing on fire!
