[Email Marketing] How To Reactivate Your Stale Email List

A stale email list is one that’s been inactive for 3-6 months.

If you haven’t sent any marketing emails to your subscribers for quite some time, this causes a number of problems.

Problem #1

When you try to send your next email campaign, you’re likely to get a lot of unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints.

This, in turn, affects your future email deliverability, making it far more likely that your future communications end up in your subscribers’ spam folders. Doh!

The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of time on creating marketing emails that never get seen.

Problem #2

You’re leaving money on the table.

Have you ever heard the expression: “The money is in the list”?

There are numerous studies demonstrating that the highest-converting marketing channel is email. Here are just two:

1. Email marketing remains the best digital channel for ROI
2. The new rules of email marketing

If you aren’t regularly communicating with your subscribers, in addition to working on list growth, you’re missing a huge revenue opportunity.

So the long story short? A stale email list = future sales lost.

(If you’re up for it, you can even try to calculate how much revenue you’re losing by using this Email Marketing ROI Calculator.)

Learn How To Reactivate Your Stale Email List

Now, I’m not going to spend the majority of this post touting the benefits of email marketing. You can read about them here, here and here.

Instead, the objective of this article is to help you reactivate your stale list…in a way that minimizes the impact on future deliverability.

So what should you do?

1. Clean your list, removing undeliverable email addresses.
2. Send an email campaign to your subscribers using our Warm ‘Em Up email script.

Now, be prepared to still receive unsubscribers. But, this tried and true method should help reduce the negative impact on your list.

After Your Stale Email List Has Been Reactivated

Equally as important as reactivating your stale list, is maintaining (and improving) engagement.

Here are a few best practices you should be incorporating into your email marketing strategy.

• Send frequent, regular email campaigns
• Implement automated email sequences to confirm interest of inactive subscribers
• Prune your email list on a quarterly basis
• Monitor your email marketing performance on an ongoing basis

It takes a lot of work to grow your list. Don’t do yourself a disservice by letting your email list go stale again. You’ll regret it!

Have you let your email list go stale? If so, what will you make sure to do so it doesn’t happen again? Let me know in the comments below.