233: Wake the Dead: How to Reengage Cold Email Subscribers Before Q4

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Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today.

Hey friends, Destiny here and welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast where I help you turn your expertise and digital products into a predictable rinse and repeat revenue stream. And today we're talking about a topic that isn't very flashy but absolutely will help you move the needle in your business and that is cleaning and re engaging your email list so that more of your people actually see what you send out. And this is especially important as we head into Q4 because here's the thing. Your email list is about to do the heavy lifting for your Black Friday and your holiday promotions. But if your open rates are slipping or if your list is way down with what I call these ghost subscribers who never open up your emails, your best offers may never even make it into their inbox. And that can mean thousands of dollars left on the table for you. And that's why I'm inviting you to join me for this month's newsletter profit club workshop called Wake the Dead System. I'm going to be going live on Wednesday, September 17 and replays will be available for free for all of our newsletter profit club members. And I do have an option for people to purchase separately and I will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes. In this workshop I'm going to be joined by email marketing expert and consultant called Bev Feldman. She is with your personal tech Sari and I hired her to set up this exact system for both of my newsletters. So I'm super excited that she has agreed to join me in this workshop and we're going to be walking you through all of this together. But before I get into a little bit more detail on what we're going to be covering and how you can do this yourself, I want to give you a little bit of a backstory in terms of why I went down this path to do this for both of my newsletters. And here's what happened. I started looking on the dashboard and looking at my email stats and I saw this slow, steady decline in my open rates for my broadcast email. So basically the email newsletters that I was sending out every week, when I have seen this happen, generally what I would do would just be to go in and do some list cleaning and get those cold email subscribers off of my list. But as my brands and email list have grown, I knew that kind of quick fix wasn't strategic enough and that I needed a better system that would basically protect buyers in my members and my memberships from getting removed by mistake. I also have a lot of different ways that people come into my world, and I'm using different systems and tags and checkout tools. I was bringing all of those into this cold subscriber automation that we had. So there was a lot going on. And I wanted something that was running automatically in the background of my business that I was confident about, that I knew it was working. And I wanted all of this to be done before we moved into Q4 and into some of the heaviest email marketing times of the year. And I knew we're going to be sending out a lot of emails. So I wanted all of this set up, and I wanted to make sure that I was moving into the holiday system with a very clean email list, because that's going to protect my visibility and making sure that people will actually see my emails. Now, before I dive into this a little deeper, I want to take a second and clear up a few big myths that you might have about cleaning your email list. And the first one is, deleting subscribers means losing money. And I get it. You work hard to get those email subscribers. Maybe you participated in a bundle or you were at a speaker at a summit, or even worse, maybe you even paid for them with doing, like, Facebook or Instagram ads. You absolutely worked hard to get them on your email list in the beginning. But here's the thing. Inactive subscribers cost you in two ways. Number one, they're going to increase your platform fees. And number two, they are going to drag down your engagement and deliverability. And a smaller, healthier list will almost always generate more sales than a massive and unresponsive one. Now, myth number two is that cold subscribers aren't worth the effort. And the truth is, some of your best future buyers are people who just need the right nudge. So in hobby school, we built a three email wake the dead sequence that will gently re engage those subscribers who haven't opened or clicked an email in months. So instead of just automatically cutting them, which I had been doing in the past, I gave them something valuable. In this case, it was our Creative Escape bundle. It had a printable journal in it, a coloring book, and some guided meditations. And here's what happened. Many of those cult subscribers reconnected, clicked, and even went on to join one of our events. Myth number three is that re engagement has to be complicated and overwhelming. That re engagement campaign that we did in hobby school was just three simple emails. One offering a free bundle, one showing them what events we have coming up next, and then one final thank you before removing them. So. So it was very simple, it was respectful and definitely effective. Myth number four is that list cleaning feels pushy or maybe even a little unfriendly. And I would say this is another big misconception because when done right, list cleaning is actually a service for them. You are responsible people's inboxes and you're giving them the choice to stay or go. So with the hobby school sequence that I've been talking about, we weren't saying open this up or else we were saying here's a free gift or here's what's coming up next and if you want to stay, we'd love to have you. If not, no hard feelings. So that tone in that verbiage builds trust and not resentment. And myth number five is that list cleaning is a one time chore. It is not a set and forget it task. It is something that you can revisit every so often. So the good news is once you've built a system like the one we're going to be showing you in the workshop, it becomes easy to run in your business in the background on automation. So now I want to give you the high level overview of the framework that we're going to be walking through in the workshop. So step one, you are going to define what inactive means for your business. You're going to pick one simple rule that you can automate and a lot of creators use 60 to 90 days of no opens or clicks. And if you're nervous about this, you can pick and start with a conservative window like 90 days. And you can always tighten that up a little bit later. Step number two, you are going to define and protect the people who must never be removed. So this might mean your customers, if you have a membership, you don't want the active memberships to be removed. It includes Maybe even any VIPs that you have on your email list, maybe some partners that you have. So anyone who has also clicked or purchased recently, you should consider excluding them. And if you're using checkout tools like ThriveCart, you want to make sure that those purchases are always adding the right tags instantly and have those in your automations so that you can route people around the re engagement flow correctly. Now step number three, you're going to segment your ghost subscribers. So this is the group that you will actually want to re engage with them. So you're going to create a segment like re engage 90 days inactive, not excluded. So those are the people who will get your RE engagement sequence. And then in step number four, you're going to send out a three part email RE engagement sequence. And like I said, the one that I did for hobby school started with the free gift. But it was very clear to them if they click, they would stay on our email list or they could unsubscribe if they wanted to. But if they clicked they would stay on our email list. And if they didn't, we were going to be removing them at some point. Email number two, which goes out approximately two to three days later, you want to acknowledge that people are busy and then you're going to give them another way to engage with you. In our situation, what we did there is we gave them the link to our future workshops because a lot of people want to hang around. If they see an event, they're like, okay, I'm interested in that, I don't want to miss that. Let me stay on their email list. And then email number three is basically the final one that you send out and you're going to remind them that it's okay if they're not interested, they can just unsubscribe. And if they don't click, then you're going to move to basically take them and unsubscribe them from your email list. So anyone who engages, they're going to get a tag that basically says, okay, they're not a cold subscriber anymore, but anyone who ignored everything, you are going to move them to a queue where you're going to absolutely remove them completely. And then in step six, you're going to make this a repeatable process. You're going to run the sequence on a regular basis so you don't have to worry about it. I know I gave you a lot there, but if you want a fast win before the workshop, here is your challenge. Go ahead and build a segment in your email service provider that includes maybe the 60 to 90 day inactive. So basically that is people who have not opened up one of your emails in that time frame. And you want to make sure that you are excluding like active members of yours or buyers that you don't want to take off of your email list. That is your action before the workshop. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I really want to dig into this Further, this is exactly what we're going to be doing in Wake the Dead System workshop on Wednesday, September 17th. So if you're a member of the newsletter Profit Club already, you are in. Just check your dashboard, check the emails that I've been sending you, add it to your calendar. If you're not a member, now is the perfect time to join. You're going to get this workshop, you're going to get all the swipes, and you're going to get ongoing support for monetizing your newsletter. And if you'd rather just purchase the workshop by itself, you can absolutely do that too. Don't forget that replays are available. And like I said, I'm bringing in Bev Feldman, who is an email marketing strategist and consultant who specializes in helping business owners simplify and streamline their email systems. And I'm super excited to have her. She's going to walk us through exactly how she set this up in hobby school so you can see everything step by step. All right, thanks so much for joining me and I hope to see you in our live workshop. Bye for now.

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