Ignite Dead Email List: Why & How

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know how powerful email marketing is. According to a DMA study, the return on advertising spend on email marketing is a whopping 42 dollars. Sounds crazy, right?

Well, this can happen to your eCommerce store as well! However, for this, you need to make sure your email list isn’t dead. So in this article, we’ll tell you why your email list might be dead and the three steps to reviving it.

Before Reengaing with your Audience… 

However, before I reveal to you the five steps to reviving your email list, we should first understand why it happened in the first place. That way, we can learn from it and ensure it won’t happen again.

But unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to it. Each email list is different, meaning the reasons are unique. But despite that, there are three common reasons why it might have happened:

• Too Many Promotional Emails: While email lists are excellent at getting more sales for free, you shouldn’t promote your products too frequently. People don’t want to fill their mailboxes with sales pitches. So make sure you get more valuable emails.
• Too Infrequent Emails: Another potential reason why it happened is that you’re not sending enough emails. While the information might be valuable, it won’t be opened as it could be lost inside the mailbox. So instead of doing that, try sending emails more frequently.
• Not Targeted to The Audience: If the other two don’t seem to be the problem, this one might be. People just aren’t interested in what you’re sending them. And since they aren’t interested, they won’t open your emails. So you’ll have to rethink your email marketing strategy.

4 Steps to Reviving Your Email List 

Now that you understand why your email list might be lacking engagement, it’s time to take action and bring your online store email list back to life! For this, all you have to do is follow the next four steps:

Step #1 – Create an Email Marketing Plan

The first step of our plan for reviving your email list is to create a new email marketing plan. Since the email list is dead right now, there are some changes we need to start making.

What you need to do depends on what your core issues are. For example, if you used to send too many promotional emails, you need to think of ways to create value-added emails. So brainstorm how you can give them value and go to the next step.

Step #2 – Clean Up Your Email List

Next, we should first start cleaning up our email list. That means you must stop emailing those who have been inactive for a long time or are just useless, like fake or invalid emails. That’s because your statistics won’t be as good if you don’t.

You can do a couple of things to start cleaning up:

• Use an Email Validator: The first thing that you’ll need to do is get rid of invalid and fake emails. For this, you can use an email validator. Once it has gone through the list, remove the bad emails mentioned.
• Removing Inactive Subscribers: You need to research all the emails left and see if users haven’t opened an email in six months or more. And while that could be many subscribers, it’s going to be necessary. That’s because inactive subscribers probably won’t become clients!

Once you’ve gone through your list, it’s time for the next step.

Step #3 – Start Sending Re-Engagement Emails

Now that we’ve cleaned up our email list, it’s time to create a spark that helps us increase engagement. For this, we should first send re-engagement emails. These are like your regular emails, but you send them at a lower volume.

That helps you to avoid any problems such as mass unsubscribes, which could hurt, if not kill, your email list. So start by picking a small batch of emails. An excellent place to start might be at 10% of your list.

Once that’s done, double the emails. Next time you’ll send a new newsletter. The objective is to warm up your email list without being too drastic.

However, when you do, you should look out for a couple of things:

• High-Bounce Rates

• Mass Unsubscribes

• Low Open Rates

If any of the three happens, this might signal problems with your email addresses, or you might have to improve your email content to make them more appealing.

Once you’ve started sending newsletters to your entire list, you’re ready for your next step.

Step #4 – Analyse Your Performance and Repeat the Process

Now all that is left to do is analyze how well your emails perform. If they are doing great, you’ve officially revived your email list. However, if you can’t, then don’t worry, as there’s still time to work on it.

But whatever the outcome, you should repeat the process. That’s because there’s always something you can improve upon. Repeat the process, and your email marketing will become even more effective.

Conclusion

And that’s it! Now you know the exact steps to reviving your email list. If you have a dead list that needs some reviving, why not take some action? Send emails to your old dropshipping suppliers and revive the collaboration.

If you don’t, the information you learned from this article will collect dust and eventually be forgotten. Instead of letting it come to that, follow the four-step guide, and you’ll reap the benefits.

(Contributed by Andreas Ojala & Hermes Fang)