#156 - How to bring a dead email list back to life

They got to be gone. You got to stop sending to them because it is impacting how much your emails even show up in someone's inbox.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your Host, serial entrepreneur, six and seven figure funnel strategist, and Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit, too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hey, hey, guys, it is Kate here from hellofunnels and welcome back to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I've got a quickie and a super, super actionable one. Well, they're all actionable, but this one is one you're probably going to want to, as soon as this episode's finished, stop whatever you're doing, head on over your computer and get it done. Done. So today we are talking about giving your email list some cpr. Now, for those of you out there who are like, hey, I get open rates 40%, like, I'm good. You, you can, you can probably skip this one or maybe save it in your files for if, in a year or so's time, if you've been a little neglectful on your list and it has slowed down and you need to give it a bit of a kickstart. But for those who are like most people out there and you're getting email, you know, open rates of under 20%, like 15%, 10%, whatever, and you're like, I just, you. I haven't been sending consistent content or I've been just bombarding with too many offers or whatever it is. You haven't been giving enough love to your list. And it shows then this is a really, really simple process. It doesn't even, doesn't take very long. You can get this done, like, all set up, all done in probably a couple hours. And it will really help to reengage your list to increase your open rates and to just like get, give you that little jolt. Like I said, it's like a cpr. Like, get things moving again. And then after that, it's up to you to make sure you're delivering the value. You're, you know, you're connecting and all that stuff. But we're going to help you to get, get the things rolling. So a couple of sort of just little, I'll call it housekeeping things you need to do first before we talk about, like, what the actual, like the three CPR emails are. So first of all is before you do anything before you send another email. If you haven't done any list hygiene in the last 12 months, then it now is the time. So what that list hygiene means is that you need to go into your list and you need to. And like, depending on which system you use, there's different ways of filtering for these things. But basically you need to figure out who is actually even reading your emails anymore because there's no point sending emails to people who aren't opening them. So what we normally do is go through, run a, like a search inside your contacts and find the people who haven't opened, read, clicked anything with your emails in the last six months or more. And then you have two options then depending on how. What's the how? MARIE KONDO I guess it is you're feeling you can either just move them off into a separate list and call that list like not engaged or something like that. But that does mean that you are still paying for these people who don't open your emails anyway, or you can just delete them. And the reason that you want to do this is because like I said, there's going to be a certain percentage of people on your list and this is even like the best, most engaged list have these people who, you know, maybe they're no longer in that place in their life where the solution you talk about is relevant or, you know, maybe things have changed. Maybe they've got busy, maybe they don't have a business anymore if you help with businesses or maybe they've moved, you know, they're focusing on something else right now if they haven't. And you know, they might still like you and you know, so they like usually hitting that unsubscribe like button that's normally like a, you know, that's like a divorce, right? And they're not ready for divorce. They're, you know, they're just, they're just having a trial separation. But you kind of need to be the one who rips off that band aid because, well, a few reasons. One, you're paying for them, okay? So they're adding up to the totals that you're paying your email system every month. And they can add up. The other one is that you actually, it's impacting your open rates. So when you send out like and I, and you know, I'm not going to go too nerdy on this, but basically if you're sending out your emails to everybody on your list and like 20% of those people are no longer interested, and then that means that a much Smaller percentage of your, you know, of a much smaller percentage of the total is opening in the first place, right. And your, the servers, the systems, the, the, all the things, they know this, they're like, oh, you only get like a 10% open rate. Your emails might not be very good. So your emails, things coming from you start to get scored lower which means you have a much higher chance of ending up in spam, in promotions, all of that stuff and not. And then being seen even less and then having an even lower open rate. So it becomes this like perpetual cycle. So you need to make sure that like yes, it can hurt to go to get, you know, to delete a few thousand people off your email list. And like I said, I would make sure that if you want to sort of do it in the, you know, the safety first kind of way, I would put them off into a separate list and leave them there for a month or two. What and just send your emails normally and just see the impact, see has your open rates improve and all that kind of stuff. And then when you're feeling comfortable, then delete them. Or you can just go nuclear and delete them right now. But either way they got to be gone. You got to stop sending to them because it is impacting how much your emails even show up in someone's inbox. So that's number one. Go and do your list hygiene. And it should be something that if you can't set up something automatic, like a lot of systems actually will have little tutorials like ActiveCampaign does how to set this up to be automatic so that if someone hasn't opened or read something in six months, they automatically get removed. We have with the automatic ones we also have the extra step or if they haven't been and visited your website just to make sure that you know, you're not removing anybody who is, who is interested. And remember that they've now brought in with Apple and stuff that it's much harder for the email systems to be able to check if someone's actually opening all your emails. So you want to try and make sure you're ticking as many boxes there as well. But for the older ones right now that should be fine. So that's first step. Clean up your list and then just make sure that you're doing that regularly. Like if you have to do it manually, do it every six months. And if you can set up a automatic thing, do that list hygiene done. Next is you want to now also while you're in that little contacts area is to Create a segment of your most engaged contacts. So those are the people who open and read all the time. And again, it really does depend on your email system exactly what kind of criteria you can put in here. But it's maybe it's people who have opened more than three emails in the last four weeks or something like that. Like who are the, you know, who are your top people? The people who love to hear from you, who read everything. And the reason we want to have them in a separate list is like similarly to before is what if you're sending out your emails to everyone and there's a bunch of people who you know aren't even seeing them anymore, aren't interested at all and that's going to impact your you negatively. If you send out some emails to your best people who are always open and you sending a few emails just to them, your score goes up because the percentage of people that are opening is really high in relation to the number of emails that you sent because those are the people who always read your emails. So step number two. So step number one, get rid of the unengaged. Step number two, find the most engaged and then either from now on, you don't have to do this for every single email, but it is good practice if you can, even though it is obviously it does take a little bit more, you know, setting up and you probably want to va to probably help you with this. But for at least for the, the three emails we're gonna talk about next, you wanna be sending to this segment first. Okay. And, and, and it's good practice actually to send, to do this with all your emails. Send to the engaged segment first and then like an hour later, once they've had a chance, most of them had a chance to jump in and open it or even two hours later or whatever it is, then send to everybody else. So it's almost like having two lists and you know, sending the same email to list number one first and then a few hours later sending say that to list number two and it will just help or more of those people in list number two to actually see those emails in the first place. And that will give you a higher open rate for those as well. Okay. Third thing that I want you to make sure you are doing with every email is and again, this will depend on your email system. You can do this. Activecampaign. I'm pretty sure you can do it. ConvertKit most of them mailchimp stuff. I'm pretty sure, you know, with most of the major ones you need to Be doing a B split testing of your subject lines every time you send an email campaign. Like, it just takes an extra 5. Like not even 5. It takes an extra like 60 seconds of setting up your email to do this. And what this means is like every time you write an email, you need to come up with two email subject lines and use all the tricks, guys. Make sure that you know, you're including some emojis. Make sure that they're really short, that they're uninspected. You know, adding in people's names occasionally, not all the time because it does wear out if you do it all the time. They have two very different subject lines. And like this is something that actually ChatGPT is great for you. Write an email, chuck it in there and say, give me like five short, unexpected or clickbait style or whatever. You know, you can use this, whatever prompts you want to use. Subject line, ask for 20. Like you can do as many as you need like instantly, right? Use one emoji and it will give you a bunch of options. So pick your two favorites. But what this means is the way that you set up and send your emails from now on is that you're going to and what your email system will do is when you put in those two. So you select, you want it to be split test or a B test and then you go, you know, email one, email two. Those are the only things that you need to change. And then you're going to set it to send to 10% of your list first. And again, if you're doing this with the segment, you know, your warmest, most engaged segment first, still use them first. And then just whichever one is the winner, send that to everybody else. But yeah, send to send that those two subject lines to 10% of your list each wait for an hour, see which one gets the highest rate of opens and then the rest, the other 80% of your list gets that subject line. Okay, so that's how we do, that's how you do split test. So those are three things you need to make sure you're doing always. Now, once you've done this little bit of housekeeping, now it's time to like actually send the CPR email campaign. And this is really, really simple, guys. Okay, so you're going to send three emails to your list a day apart. They are going to be text based, so they're going to need to get rid of your fancy formatting for a minute. Just send emails that look like a personal email. Each email is going to be no more than like 80 to 100 words. So like short, like, like a short paragraph and a link. And I, what I want you to do is I want you to think about like what are the three most impactful pieces of content that you have ever created? So the three things that you know, every time people are like, oh my gosh, truth bomb, nugget, gold nugget, whatever, you know, like that just blows people away. Find those three pieces and then you're basically going to create a little, just little teaser snippet, a really personal sounding like, you know, like, hey, have you been struggling with this? Or I thought you this was okay, now my brain's not working. This is the problem of trying to record the podcast early in the morning, right? The creativity and the coffee have not quite kicked in yet. But you know, just, you can keep them short, you can keep them really conversational. Just like something you would send to a friend that's like if you saw something really cool you wanted your friend to read then and you're like, and here, here's the link, go check it out. That is the vibe, that is the, the tone that you want to have for these three emails. And you're going to send them, as I said, following all the steps we talked about before. So you're going to send them to the most engaged list. First you're going to split test the subject lines and then you're going to send them to everybody. And if you do that for those three emails, then you will be amazed at the uptake and the upkeep that you have with your open rates. Firstly for those initial emails and then going forward, like you will kind of like these helps you just sort of break through that. Bit of a lull, a bit of like that, like feel it, you know, people kind of going, oh, I'll read them later. Like this just helps to re engage and get them excited about getting your emails again. Now let's say guys, really, really simple process. Get those emails moving again and if you try it, let us know. Make sure you DM us or tag like chuck it in your stories. Tag us at hellofunnels. Let us know. We love seeing these strategies out in the wild. I've seen clients do this and it's just been game changing. So I'm really excited for you guys to go and try it. But anyway guys, this taste been as I said, a quick one but a nerdy one. I hope it's been super useful. And yeah, love to know what you think. Love to know if you try it. Love it even more if you could, you know, share this around with anyone you think would find it useful. And then I will see you guys or you'll hear me at least. Same time next week for another episode of Doing It Online. Alrighty guys, have a great week. See you then. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnels, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.