We all know what happens when a friend ghosts us. We get annoyed or hurt and would probably give them a tough time when they come crawling back into our lives. But what happens when we ghost our email subscribers for months?
Maybe you got carried away with life and forgot to reach out to your subscribers. Or perhaps you ran out of content and didn’t want to bug them with irrelevant emails. Whatever the case, trying to reach out to your old email list after a long hiatus can be quite scary.
What if everyone unsubscribes the minute they get your re-engagement mail? What if no one trusts you or your brand anymore? Or what if no one even opens your email at all?
All these questions and more are probably racing through your mind.
However, there’s good news. Even if your subscribers haven’t heard from you in months, there are ways through which you can sneak back into their inboxes and hearts.
Ready? Let’s find them out.
Why Should You Re-engage Your Neglected Email List?
You are probably thinking to yourself:
- “why should I re-engage my email list?”
- “Is it worth it?”
- “They probably hate me already, so why bother?”
Just in case these thoughts are still running through your head, here’s why you shouldn’t give up on your old email list.
You Would Be Losing Money
To start with, email marketing is quite beneficial to any brand. Studies have shown that email marketing contributes a better ROI than other marketing channels. As such, it’s only wise to invest heavily. When it comes to email marketing, every subscriber represents profit. If you don’t re-engage and win them back, you’d be leaving a truckload of profit on the table.
It Is the Easy Way Out
Remember how hard it was for you to gain new subscribers? Remember how you had to cajole, plead, and offer incentives to get people to subscribe to your list?
Reviving your old email list is considerably easier than starting all over again. Your old subscribers already know the value you bring to the table. All you have to do is remind them.
It is easier and cheaper to re-engage your neglected email list than to start over and try to get more subscribers. Click To TweetSend Warm-Up Emails
A warm-up email warms your audience back up. If your subscribers haven’t heard from you in weeks or months, you have to warm them up to see if they still care about you and your content.
But how exactly do you send a warm-up email? What should be the subject line for reconnecting email lists? Here are two trusted methods you could try:
Method One – Acknowledging Your Absence
The first way is to send a mail acknowledging your absence and then follow it up with two or three other mails.
The first email should be a welcome email, apologizing for your absence and explaining why you have been away. You can structure this email in any way, but it’s always advisable to start off with subjects or initial text like:
- “I’m sorry…”
- “I’ve missed you…”
- “Remember me?”
- “Welcome back”
Phrases like these are more likely to evoke positive emotions in your audience’s minds and make them listen to what you have to say.
The second email should contain resources and valuable content. If you sell products, this isn’t the mail where you start pushing your audience to be interested in what you’re selling. You’re still trying to woo them back. Send out content that would most likely be valuable and engaging to them. In the same vein, try not to crowd your mail with too many affiliate links.
The third email should be a reminder of your value and worth. Let your audience know what to expect from you. This should be a goal and a promise you can fulfill. You definitely don’t want to disappoint them.
Method Two – Ignore Your Absence
The second method pretty much involves ignoring the elephant in the room. Here, instead of acknowledging your hiatus, you just jump right into sending out valuable content to your audience.
This style has its perks. By sending out valuable content first, your subscribers will be reminded of what they have missed and, as such, be less willing to unsubscribe.
Whichever method you choose, it’s important to double your email marketing efforts. If you aren’t sure about the effectiveness of the two methods, pick one that resonates better with your email marketing strategy.
Give Out Freebies
Who doesn’t love freebies? When it comes to reawakening the dead list of subscribers, giving out free stuff is one hack that has always worked. Your audience is more likely to fall in love with you again if you make up for your absence by offering them free stuff.
There’s only one catch when giving freebies or incentives to your target audience: you have to offer them something they really need or find irresistible. Imagine offering a hungry man a tube of lipgloss when all he wants is food. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Sure, it’s a freebie, but it’s a ridiculous one.
That’s why you need to ensure that you’re giving your audience what they need. There are tons of tempting incentives you could offer to your audience. Let’s assume you sell online courses on branding, and you need to give out gifts to your target audience – people who want to learn about branding. In this case, you could offer them a free ebook on identifying brand persona.
If you aren’t sure what to offer to your subscribers, you may want to consider your audience persona. What does your average subscriber look like? What are their pain points? Why did they subscribe to your email list in the first place?
Answering these questions will give you a clearer insight into what your audience needs. This way, you’d be able to offer them valuable gifts that they would appreciate.
Stay Consistent
The last thing you want to do is regain your subscribers’ trust and then lose it by ghosting them again. After re-engaging your old email list, you have to keep up communication by constantly emailing them.
If you neglected your email list previously because you ran out of content, you may be worried that history would repeat itself. What if you run out of content again?
Just in case you run out of content, here are some easy hacks for getting content ideas:
- Remix and revamp old content ideas: Every music lover is familiar with how remixes work. It’s the same sound, similar lyrics, and just a few changes here and there. Even though remixes typically sound like the original versions, people still enjoy them. That’s just how content works. If you run out of content ideas, you can easily remix your old content to get fresh ideas. For instance, if you once created an article titled “All You Need to Know About Personal Branding”, you could remix it and create another article titled “5 Pitfalls to Avoid When It Comes to Personal Branding”.
- Check popular forums like Reddit: Reddit has one of the largest user communities today. As for 2019, it had over 430 million monthly active users. With such a large community, this forum is a buzzing hub of content ideas. If you ever run out of ideas, here’s how to use Reddit for inspiration: just find a relevant subreddit. For instance, if your niche is related to branding, you could visit a subreddit like reddit.com/r/branding to see what people are talking about. From the most popular posts, you could grab a handful of ideas and develop them into content.
- Write about your personal experiences: Believe it or not, your audience would be interested in your personal journey. Track your personal failures and successes and talk to your subscribers about them. Did you start working on a new mind-blowing project? Tell them about it. Did you dump a project recently? Share your experiences and reasons.
- Use Google Keyword Planner: You can always visit Google Keyword Planner to see what topics people are searching for. You could search for particular words and combinations to help you generate content ideas and inspiration. If you run a blog or niche on content writing, you could search for keywords like: “essay writing” to see what combinations people have been searching for. From the results, you could gain inspiration and probably create articles like: “how to write my essay using MLA references”.
With these few tips, you can constantly dish out fresh content to your subscribers and ensure that you never neglect them again.
Next Steps
Re-engaging your neglected email list can be very frightening. However, the first thing to do is to prepare yourself for unsubscribers. A couple of people would probably choose to unsubscribe, and that’s fine. All you have to do is regain the trust of the others, engage them, and invest heavily in email marketing.
Once you committed to re-engaging your list, be sure to check out our article on how to maximize your email marketing results.
by Ahoy
