How To Warm Up A Dead List

Today's post involves one of my favorite topics.

How to warm up a “dead list” even though you haven't even communicated with them, or essentially they've just kind of like... just died out after two years.

I'm using two years as just kind of an example of the time, over the years or over the weeks, over the months, whatever… If you don't communicate with this list, they're going to forget about you. That’s just how it is.

Let's look at this in real life.

If you haven't talked to somebody in two years in real life... I mean, let's just be clear here. Yes, of course, when we have these communications with people online, it's real…

But if you're looking at this and you have a friend that used to be close and you want to reconnect with them, family reunion, high school reunion…

And you haven't talked to them in two years and the reunion's coming up... How do you re-engage them? What do you do?

Well, a lot of times if you're actually going to meet with them or talk with them. Say, for instance, you're reaching out to them on Facebook or you're actually giving them a call ‒ well, what you usually do is you just ask them how have things been.

You catch up with them. You tell them you're still thinking about them. You tell them or give them something that's worth their time. Try to give something like a gift.

So in this case, they may have come in with a blueprint, a checklist, some type of a “lead magnet”, but what you're gonna want to do is you're going to want to start slowly building back up to mailing them on a regular basis.

One of the best ways that we've done this is using quizzes, because a quiz is essentially an “at home self assessment” that has a lot of steps built into it.

Quizzes really warm up the list and also give you a lot of data about who they are. 

And so if you use a quiz or use some type of tool that encourages them or gets them to take a number of steps but also benefits them greatly, then I 100% agree and believe that you need to go down a path that is giving first.

(Pro tip…) Try to give three things in a row.

If they still haven't answered, they still haven't opened and you've officially gone to their death spam box, then move them off your list and then completely go away, alright?

Don't mail them, just leave them alone.

The thing is eventually if you're continuing to mail lists that aren't responding to you, your deliverability will go down. It will go down so much that you will start going from inboxing to social and promotions and then spam.

So that is the track record and that's the approach by which you're going to end up. That obviously is mostly through Gmail, but you have to understand if you keep mailing a dead email over and over again… it creates problems.

Two years isn't super long, but it’s still within the time frame there’s a good chance they've switched accounts and aren't even touching that email address anymore.

And that's where, when you start mailing emails that are now shut down, that's the number one way that you're going to start getting complaints. You're going to start getting spam traps. You're going to start basically falling into lower credibility with all your email providers.

So again, give great value. Give as much as you can out of the gates, slowly warm them up back into your normal schedule.

Do an email – see how it goes. Send an unopen – see how it goes. Go and actually try to lead with as much value and go with the, "I have a gift for you and I want to know how I can best serve you," and send them a deep dive survey.

I think that in this realm, you have to think, what can I do to get in somebody's good graces? And what would you do in normal life to actually get them back in?

And that is really asking questions, finding out more about them, giving them something worth their time, and also giving them something that they're gonna really want to pay attention to that's out of the box.

Something out of the ordinary that makes you unique and makes them remember why they subscribed to you from the start, okay?

So if you're curious even more about how you can build or rebuild the list from scratch, from the start, and you maybe want to do it the right way, we've put together a checklist for you on how we do our lead gen and how we serve our clients and also build all of our in house lists.

This is our Million Person Checklist.

This is what we use to build all of our tools. This is everything that we've learned over the years. We've got it in one very cool little downloadable cheat sheet, so if you want that, which I hope you do, go ahead and head on down below this post. There's a link to go and get that.

It'll actually send you right over to the next page and that page is where you can actually grab it. Super simple, I really think it's going to do some good.

Thank you! Have a fantastic day and I hope you check out some of my other blog posts and videos. There'll be some links below and on the side, see you soon!