Email Marketing Strategy – Warm Up a Cold Email List Fast

You don't need a ton of experience to take this course. As long as you understand your own email tool and how to send emails and review metrics, you should be able to follow this course. It will be helpful if you understand some basic email marketing terms, like open rates, click-through rates, email automations, etc. If you're looking for a primer on email marketing, check out Email and Newsletter Marketing Foundations in the library. Additionally, if you want to jot down any notes or metrics, take advantage of the notebook feature and download all of your notes at the end of the course. Let's jump in. An email list is one of the most powerful marketing assets a business creates. But that only applies if it's a warm list, a list where you're regularly communicating with your audience. Unfortunately, most businesses don't keep their lists warm, and emails end up in the spam folder. In this course, we're going to cover how you can warm up your email list and re-engage a portion of your gold subscribers. We'll dig into the best practices, specific emails that you can send, and I'll also highlight the process by covering what I did with two clients. Hi, my name is Patrick Rolland, and I love helping businesses with their marketing and e-commerce needs to set them on the path to success. Your email list can easily be your best marketing channel, but you do have to keep the list warm. So let's start this course and warm up that email list. In the challenge video, I asked you to use your own newsletter data to figure out the gold subscribers, and if you cut them, what open rate you need to see to have the same number of readers. Let's start with the newsletter size. My client had 29,000 subscribers at the start of this process. Then, you can use your email tool to see how many subscribers are cold, which we covered earlier in this chapter. My client had, at the time, 19,000 unengaged subscribers, which leaves us with about 10,000 engaged subscribers. Next, you'll want to use your email tool to look at the last dozen or so emails and ballpark the open rate. We had open rates ranging from 5% to 20% for most of our emails. And one of the last emails we sent to the entire list had an 18.5% open rate, which was roughly 4,000 opens. And that was for a very important piece of content that we release once a year. It should have the best open rate all year. Let's go back to our spreadsheet. I'll copy these numbers over. Our typical open rate is about 14%, and our best open rate is about 18%. Now let's do the math to see how many users we could cut from our list as long as we're improving our open rate. If we cut 5,000 unengaged users, we need a 16% open rate. If we cut 10,000 unengaged users, we need a 21% open rate. And if we cut 15,000 unengaged users, we need a 28% open rate. And just to show you a little of the Excel math, I want to have at least 4,000 opens, and I divide that number by the number of subscribers left after removing cold subscribers. Just in case we wanted to be more conservative and only cut some of the cold subscribers. In the end, we cut a little over 50% of our list. We needed to increase our open rate from 14% to at least 28%. And that seems plausible. Counterintuitively, the lower your open rates, the more room you'll have to grow. If you have an open rate of less than 10%, you'll probably remove a large amount of your list, but the remaining list will have a very high open rate. So how do my client do once I cut over 50% of their list? In the next recent weekly email, which is our typical content, we have a 51% open rate, which is far over 4,000 opens. Your numbers are of course going to vary based on your newsletter. What I really want you to get from this challenge is that you can have a much smaller list with a higher open rate and still have the same number of readers. By having that smaller, more discerning list, some of those emails that would have gone into spam will land in the inbox, tempting users to open the email, click the links, and buy your products. In the next chapter, we're going to start the process of warming up your list. If you're still on the fence of whether or not you should clean your list, it's worth running some numbers. I want you to take your current email list and estimate how many people you're most likely going to cut from the list. Then determine what open rate you'd like to see from the remaining subscribers to have at least the same or better number of readers. A very simple example would be, I have 10,000 subscribers on my email list. 5,000 of them are cold. I have a 20% open rate, which is roughly 2,000 readers. If I cut 5,000 readers from my list, I'd have to see at least a 40% open rate for the same number of readers. Go ahead and dig into your own newsletter list and write down the results you want to see in the notebook feature. By the end of this course, you can see if you hit or even exceeded your goal. In the next video, I'll show you how I calculated this for my client. The first step to re-engaging your email list is to measure and define cold subscribers in your list. For many businesses, this is going to be a time-based or frequency-based definition. For a time-based definition, that might be someone like a user who hasn't opened any of our emails in the last six months. For a frequency-based definition, we might say a user who hasn't opened any of the last 10 emails. If you're running a seasonal business like a Halloween store or a lawn care business, you may want to use that time-based definition. And if someone didn't bother to read any of your emails in your last busy season, they're very likely a cold subscriber. For a Halloween business, I'd say any user who hasn't opened an email since October of the previous year. If you're not a seasonal business, then using a simple metric such as a user who hasn't opened the last 10 emails is a great starting point. For my client, we used the frequency of emails as the definition for a cold subscriber. In our case, we decided 10 emails was about right. This business sent so few emails that this also happened to be about a year-long period. I'll show you in our email marketing platform, Drip, how we defined a cold subscriber. I'm already logged in in Drip, and this is the homepage. From here, we can go to People and then Save Segments. Let's scroll down to the next page. And here we can see Not Highly Engaged, Have Not Opened or Clicked Any of the Last 10 Emails. Let's go ahead and click on this. And as you can see, we're using two conditions. The first condition is that the reader hasn't opened any of the last 10 emails. This is the primary filter that we're using. We are also using a second condition, that they have to have been on our email list for at least a year. If you're using Drip, you could use one or both of these conditions. Or you can, of course, add as many conditions and filters as you like. Now let's take a look at how to do this with the most popular email tool for small businesses, MailChimp. This is a fictitious account that LinkedIn built just for this course. From here, Audience and then Segments. Here we'll see a helpful Disengage Subscribers pre-built segment. Let's go ahead and click on this. And here we can change the definition to whatever works for your business. And you can add as many conditions as you like. Right now, this is set to Did Not Open Any of the Last 5 Emails. Let's go ahead and change that to Did Not Open All the Campaigns Within the Last 3 Months. Then click Review Segment. There are nine contacts that are cold. And we'll save this segment. We'll cover setting up a dynamic segment to keep track of which users are cold in a future video. For now, I recommend browsing through your email service provider and jotting down the number of cold subscribers. You can store that number in the notebook feature for your reference. I'll refer to this number through the rest of the course. And you'll actually need it for the next video, which is a challenge. Throughout this course, we're going to be talking about email lists with cold subscribers and cold email lists. These sound similar, but they are actually different. And one of these requires a few extra steps to warm up. Let's start with the most common challenge. And that is cold subscribers on your email list. Most businesses know they should collect email addresses. And so they do. They offer a lead magnet or some sort of download in exchange for an email. And most of these emails get opened. But that's where the strategy ends for most small businesses. There's too many other things to do. And they send a few email blasts out, but nothing consistent. As businesses send out infrequent email blasts to the whole list, some subscribers enjoy this content and engage with it by opening the emails, reading and clicking the links. These are your warm subscribers. But eventually, some people forget who is sending these emails, why they initially signed up, and they just start deleting or ignoring these emails. These are your cold subscribers. And through this course, we're going to show you how to re-engage some of these cold subscribers and how to delete the rest. The harder and more challenging problem is a cold email list. This is what happens when you get an email list from a source that you've never emailed before, and the users typically didn't know they'd wind up on your email list. Examples of this are buying an email list, which is rarely a good idea and usually puts the vast majority of your emails in the spam folder. Being a sponsor at an event where there's an agreement to collect attendee emails. Running some sort of joint marketing event, such as a webinar where there's an agreement to collect attendee emails. Acquiring a company or list from another brand and merging it into your main list, and so on. Cold email lists are harder to engage. Most users won't recognize your name when you pop into their inbox. Many of them will delete the email or even mark the email as spam without even opening it. This makes it more likely to land in the spam folder for the rest of the list. If you have a cold email list, you'll want to be extra careful warming up that list. Make sure to follow all of the steps in this course, and I'll highlight a few areas where you can add extra warming up emails to try to convert as much of that audience as possible into warm email subscribers. In the next video, we'll look at how to identify a cold subscriber using metrics. It's not obvious why having cold subscribers, which are basically unengaged readers, on your list is bad for business. The logic you might hear from a boss or someone else who really cares about how big the email list is, just because they didn't open the last 10 emails, doesn't mean they won't open the next email, and we should send out our message to every possible person. And the default position in business is to keep every subscriber on the list. But there are actually some downsides to emailing a cold list. And counterintuitively, removing cold subscribers from your list means that more emails will go to people who might actually open the email, click the link, and buy the product. Let me show you why that is. Because you may have to convince yourself or a boss why you should do this. Let's first talk about delivery. Delivery means an email was in fact delivered to the recipient. But it doesn't say where it was delivered. Delivering an email to the inbox is highly valuable. Delivering an email to the spam folder is almost useless. Getting an email to an inbox instead of the spam folder is called deliverability. This course will focus on deliverability. Because getting emails to the inbox is more important than sending more emails. Email service providers all have their own AI-powered systems that analyze emails to determine if they're spam. While none of these systems are disclosed, email marketers have discovered some of the more common signals that can put an email into spam. The signal we're going to focus on for this course is your sender reputation. And each mailbox software tracks your sender reputation based on the actions they see their users take. It may be obvious that marking an email as spam is bad for your sender reputation. But also deleting an email without opening, opting out, and leaving email unread are negative signals. After all, if someone sees the email and doesn't bother to open it, then it's probably not that important to the user. And if one user doesn't find it important enough to open, then others also probably won't find it important enough. That's why mailbox software moves emails to the spam folder, because they're trying to help their users. But of course, there are customers who actually want to hear from you who don't see your email because it ended up in their spam folder. The solution for improving your deliverability is to be more discerning. Send emails to people who likely want to read them. If you can identify which users probably won't open your emails, remove them from your list. And instead of 10 positive signals and 10 negative signals, now you have 10 positive signals and 2 negative signals. That means more emails get delivered to the inbox, and more people will see your message, click the link, and buy your product. In the next video, we'll dive into the difference between a cold email list and cold subscribers, and how that will affect your re-engagement campaign. Let's see what plan I came up with for an e-commerce brand. A few years back, I ran a Kickstarter campaign for my game Fry Thief. I'd like to re-engage that email list for a future Kickstarter campaign. The first thing I have to do is come up with the groups. I only have 800 subscribers on my list, so I can send to all of those subscribers in one batch. If you have more than 5,000 to 10,000, you want to break up your emails into smaller batches, and send each batch on a different day. We're recording in August, so I'm going to plan my campaign for September. And I might as well plan for the first week of September on a Monday, which is Monday, the 4th of September. For this first email, I'm going to set expectations. This isn't a weekly email, a daily email, or even a monthly email. I'm going to set expectations that we're ramping up to another launch. So I'm going to remind them who I am, that they signed up to hear about Fry Thief, and many of them even purchased Fry Thief. And I'm going to tell them about the new game I'm working on, and why they will likely be interested in backing it. I'm going to keep this very high level at the moment. For the second email, I want to send that must-read email. You really want to grab someone's attention early. And sometimes, it's hard to talk about one of your own products fairly. So I'm going to make this a review. I'm going to use a reviewer's comments as the subject line. I'll include their full comments in the email, with a video thumbnail which links to the full review. For the third email, I'm going to tell them when this new game is going to launch, and what the price point is, as well as some additional details. And some more feedback from other reviewers. In the fourth email, I'm going to ask them if they have any questions about the game. And I'll use this to help me write future emails. Your re-engagement campaign plan will probably look totally different, and that's fine. Each business is different, and has different needs. The important thing is you're considering the reader's interests, and doing your best to re-engage with them, so that you both get something out of these emails. In the next chapter, we're going to put these pieces together, to build the whole re-engagement campaign. We've talked about what you could theoretically include in your re-engagement campaign. But I find that I don't take action if you give me the theory. I need to see the actual plan. So I'd like for you to come up with a plan for your business. What does your email list need? Start by determining how many batches you want to send. Then, plan out which emails you're going to send, in what order, and add them to the calendar. There's no right answer here. Your list may need a few extra emails, or maybe your list is so cold, that you're going to have a very short re-engagement campaign, so you can move on to other projects. Put pen to paper, and plan what your business needs. Or alternatively, you can write your plan in the notebook feature, built into LinkedIn Learning. When we come back, I'll show you how I'd re-engage a list for an e-commerce brand. One of the best signals readers can send to email providers, is to reply to your emails. And in response, for you to reply to them, and start a conversation. Logan Ury is a behavior scientist and dating coach. She runs a weekly newsletter with 68,000 subscribers, and she has sent weekly emails for over two years. Her open rate is a whopping 61%. She has a very engaged list. The reason her open rate is so high, is because her newsletter has always focused on discussion and community building. She frequently asks her audience questions. She'll then go through the hundreds of responses, and pick some of the best, and share those with her audience in a future newsletter. To re-engage your list, it will help if you encourage them to reply to you. For the third email in our re-engagement sequence, we asked our audience, what is their biggest problem? This email generated two dozen responses, which we collected in a spreadsheet, and then used to generate content ideas. Sending a one-off email asking for feedback, is good for your list. But even better, is to build a community where you engage with your list, and then share the responses. Another example of a newsletter that embraces community, is the New Fatherhood. Each week, there's a community discussion. I love sharing my thoughts, and seeing how they match with the thoughts from the rest of the community. So long-term, if you want to have really high open rates, make sure that you're encouraging users to respond to you, and you should also reply back to them. Even if it's something very short and direct, like, got your response, and will include in the next email. This is a really positive signal to email providers. In the next video, we'll plan your re-engagement campaign. In the last video, we talked about setting expectations for future content. The last email was us making a promise to our audience. This email has to deliver on that promise. If you want to send a once-a-month, 5,000-word deep dive into a subject, this email should show your new format. It should show users what they'll keep receiving, as long as they're on the list. We want to start strong, with good open and click rates. The idea is if you start sending batches of emails, the very first batch, which sets expectations, should have a high open and click-through rate. This must-open email should also have a high open and click-through rate. Multiple emails being opened and clicked is a positive signal to email providers. For my client, we have a private forum with lots of activity. We decided to scour the forum, find the five most impactful topics over the past year, summarize those posts, and share them. We were able to write about these top five posts on the blog, then highlight one of the posts in the newsletter, and link the user to the post to read the other four highlights. Other ideas for a must-open email are sharing proprietary data, a live event recap, the best sale of the year, or something unique like a free 10-minute one-on-one call with a founder. Ultimately, what is irresistible to your audience is dependent on your audience. Only you will know. But do try to do something novel and different from what you typically send. Your cold subscribers already stopped reading the typical emails, so make sure you send something different. A surprising amount of email is read on mobile phones. Even if you think most of your users are reading on this desktop, for this first email, assume that they're reading on their phones. To help with that, use a short email subject line. There is some research that email subject lines with six to ten words get the highest open rates. Additionally, emails sent after lunch around 3 p.m. tend to get opened more than any other time of day. While I don't think you need to schedule every email for these times, I do think it's worth putting in the effort now to re-engage as much of your list as possible. In the next video, we'll look at why you should respond to your readers' emails. If you haven't engaged your list for a while, or if this is a brand new list that you've never emailed before, one of the best things that you can do is set expectations. Users like to know who you are and how you got their email. They want to know what you're going to talk about and how often you're going to send emails. If you're changing your newsletter to a daily email, some users will not want that. Let them unsubscribe now at the start of the process. If you remember our signals graphic from earlier in this course, an unsubscribe after opening an email is a neutral signal. It doesn't hurt your sender reputation. By setting expectations and getting a fast unsubscribe, that will make it more likely that other users will receive your emails. Conversely, if you're going daily and the reader wants daily emails, perfect! Now you've primed them to click and read future emails. For my client, we decided to go with a subject line of some exciting news at brand name. That's a subject line that prompts curiosity. It isn't just another email. It's an email that tells me some news I haven't yet heard. This email might be your most effective email in the series to get people back on your list. So make sure you have an enticing subject line. For the re-engagement campaign I ran, the first email re-engaged almost 500 users, where the rest of the emails re-engaged about 100 to 300 users. As for the content, this can actually be a pretty brief email. Focus on what will happen next. Let your audience know how often you're going to send and what you're going to cover. Assume that recipients are skimming your content. So make sure to use formatting like bold, italics, and bullet lists to communicate quickly. You can also start to train your users to respond to you. At the bottom of our email, we just added this. P.S. I'd love to hear what you'd like to hear more about via this newsletter going forward. Just reply to this email to let me know. I read everything you send. You may not get any responses to this first email. It's likely a brand new behavior for your list. But if you do get some feedback, that will help you with the rest of the re-engagement emails. By asking for feedback this early, we make it more likely to receive feedback in the later emails. We'll talk more about requesting feedback later in this course. Now that we've set expectations, we can share our best content. After you're done warming up the list, we're going to remove thousands of cold subscribers who aren't likely to re-engage. You may end up removing two-thirds of the emails from your list at the end of the campaign. But we don't have to wait until the end of the process to remove any emails that are definitely never going to re-engage. This will give the rest of our list the best chance of seeing our emails so they can re-engage. If you're warming up an existing email list, the first thing you can do is delete subscribers that never opened or clicked a single email. You can use the built-in tools to segment your audience and delete those subscribers. These people likely wanted some sort of download and used a fake email address or an email address that they only use for email marketing purposes and they never intended to be on our list. For my client, this was a little over 1,100 subscribers. The second thing that you can do is remove email addresses that are no longer functional. There are services like Kickbox that can analyze your list and determine which emails are deliverable and which are risky. You can then choose to remove those emails. Risky can mean a lot of different things to different email list cleaning services. One definition is an address at a temporary email provider. Guerrilla Mail is a good example of this. I've used them in the past to get an email from someone when I don't want to be added to their list. You can literally create an email address in seconds and they're automatically deleted in an hour. Obviously, these accounts are not useful for our email list. So you can definitely remove these types of temporary accounts. There are two other definitions of risky that Kickbox uses. Role addresses like it at domain.com and accept all email accounts, which means any name at domain.com would be valid. There's a higher chance you'll never communicate with the recipient because these are basically email junk drawers. And if you really want to clean up your list, you can remove these. For my client, we discussed and decided to leave these types of accounts on our list. In the end, removing temporary emails and undeliverable email addresses removed over 600 emails from our list. That's the low-hanging fruit done. Next, we can talk about setting expectations with your first email to the remaining list. Now that you know the fundamentals, it's time to talk about specifics. We already talked about positive and negative signals. We can use these signals to help us reach the cold subscribers to re-engage as many as possible. If email providers like Gmail haven't seen you in a while, they might not trust you. And if they see a huge email blast like 20,000 subscribers all at once, they'll be more inclined to move your message to the spam folder. It's a much better idea to show inbox software like Gmail that you are a reputable sender by sending in smaller batches. Especially if the first batch is a highly engaged group that will actually open and click your emails. A good rule of thumb is to warm up your list in batches of five to 10,000. For my client, we sent out our emails in segments roughly this big. On day one, we sent to 10,000 highly engaged users. On day two, we sent to 8,000 unengaged users from group A. And in day three, we sent to 8,000 different users from group B. Some email providers have really easy tools built in. For the email platform I was using with my client, we had to manually add a group A and a group B tag to each user, which was a little tedious. Lucky for us, MailChimp makes this easy. With a built-in schedule batch feature for standard and premium plans. If your email software doesn't automatically send in batches, you can manually apply tags like I did. Or you can actually send emails to those users at their preferred time. Let's say 11 a.m. in their local time to maximize open rates. Let's schedule a batch in MailChimp. I'm already logged in and I'm already looking at my email campaigns. I'm going to go to one of our recent campaigns and click replicate. Here's our email. This will work for us. I'll scroll down. We can, of course, click send now. And we can also schedule a time. And MailChimp has a few different settings here. We can send at a specific time to the whole list. We can send with Time Warp, which tries to use the recipient's time zone. And there's also send time optimization. And then I'll click schedule. Huzzah! And with that, we've scheduled our email to go out in batches. This should help inbox software like Gmail know that we're not spammers. People do actually open our emails and click our links. And after that first batch, the next batches should be even more likely to go into the inbox. Now that you know how to schedule emails in batches, start with your most engaged segment. They will open emails and send positive signals to email service providers that your emails offer value and aren't spam. This will maximize subscriber re-engagement. In the next video, we'll delete some obviously bad email addresses. We've come to arguably the hardest part of this course. You need to delete the cold subscribers. The vast majority of these users are never going to re-engage with you. They will keep passively sending negative signals about your sender reputation to their email provider by not opening your emails. So they're not helping your business and you should delete them. Let's get to that final email. The final email doesn't need to be complicated. Give the reader an obvious button or link to click. And make sure in your subject line you're crystal clear that they'll be unsubscribed, deleted, or removed from your list. I'm rarely a fan of using capitalization in email subject lines, but this is one of those times where it's warranted. Give your readers a timeline to click the button. I told my readers that they had one week. But behind the scenes, I actually gave them two weeks. There's no perfect time frame. Just pick one that works and move on. And that leads us to our next point. Give readers the ability to re-subscribe. Some email platforms give you a link or form to fill out. Or if that doesn't work, give them a link to re-subscribe. Or do what we did, which was let them reply to the email and we'll manually re-add them to the list. So far, a few months after cleaning the list, we've only manually re-added one user. Then, check, double check, and then triple check your segment. Make sure you're selecting the cold segment and press delete. Let me show you how to do this in MailChimp. I'm on the audience dashboard. I'll click on segments. And here we can see our disengaged subscriber segment. I'll click into that. And I did edit this from a previous video. So now we have nine subscribers here. So the first thing you'll want to do is check, double check, and triple check that these are indeed cold subscribers. You can go ahead and click into one of them and review and make sure that they haven't read any recent emails. After you're done checking, go ahead and select all of these users. Then go to actions and click unsubscribe. Go ahead and quadruple check that this is indeed the right segment and then click confirm. And that's it. We just deleted the cold subscribers out of our list. I can't wait until you send your next email blast. You should have a much higher open rate. In the next chapter, we're going to talk about how you can keep your email list warm without quite so much work. Earlier in this course, we talked about a few different emails that you can use to re-engage your list. Let's create a series of emails that we can send to our newsletter that re-engages as many subscribers as possible. For my most recent client, we sent out five emails, but you could have a re-engagement campaign that's as long or short as you want. I've seen other campaigns that are three emails long and I've been on the receiving end of some campaigns that never seem to end. There are diminishing returns, so sending three to five emails should work for most businesses. Here are the emails that we sent. The first one is let them know that the emails will be changing. This is setting expectations. The second one is sending out your best content. The third one is asking us anything. The fourth one is bonus topical content. This is, of course, optional. And the fifth one is the warning that they will be subscribed unless they click. Excluding the final email where you unsubscribe cold subscribers, all of these emails can go out to your entire list. Your re-engagement campaign can pull double duty and educate and entertain your existing subscribers while it also re-engages cold subscribers. As for timing, you can send these out at your typical cadence. If you typically send emails weekly, I'd continue that process. This reinforces the cadence with your audience and it's still a reasonable amount of time for someone to go on vacation and not be kicked off your list. We've already talked about the first three emails in the last chapter. You don't need to send a fourth email. You could skip right to the end of this process and let users know you'll delete them. But for our client, we happen to have a flagship annual event going on while we were cleaning the list. Since the timing was convenient, we added this one extra email to our re-engagement sequence. This is basically the second piece of must open email. If they don't like our best content, they're probably not the right fit for our business. So if you have the energy and time to put into another email, feel free to do so. Or if you had two great ideas for must read content, go ahead and create the second one. The benefit of sending an additional must read email is that you'll be more confident when it gets to the final step, which is deleting cold subscribers. We'll cover that in the next video. In chapter one, we looked at how you can define a cold subscriber and we covered a time-based method for defining them and a frequency-based method based on the number of emails read. And you hopefully looked at how many cold subscribers you have in your list. Once you define a cold subscriber, now you need to create a segment in your email provider. Segments help you track these users and send emails directly to them. The important part of the segment is that it needs to be dynamic. That means it needs to add and remove subscribers based on the actions they take. If you send another email that a user doesn't open, they may now qualify to be in the cold subscriber segment and they should move automatically to that segment. Similarly, if a user opens or clicks on a link, they should be moved out of the cold subscriber segment. At the very end of this process, we're going to delete all of the users in this segment. So you want to make sure it's dynamic. And as users read and open emails, they're being moved out of the segment so they won't be deleted. Depending on what email provider you use, they may already have a dynamic segment for cold subscribers. For a previous client, I used ConvertKit and they have an automatically generated segment which defines a cold subscriber, which makes this really easy. If you're using a platform like MailChimp, they also have dynamic segments. And in an earlier lesson, we created this disengaged subscriber segment. Let's go ahead and customize this a little bit more for our needs. If you didn't follow before, go ahead and click here to start creating a new one. If you already created the segment, scroll down to saved by you, then click on regular segments and you should see the segment recreated earlier. Then click edit. Here we can see the definition. And there's only one criteria right now. Email interaction did not open all the campaigns sent within the last three months. Let's change this to all the last five campaigns and I want to add one more filter. I'll click add another filter and I want to make sure that they weren't added in the last, let's say, 30 days. We'll click review segment and it looks like we have nine contacts in the segment. Let's go back and we'll edit it one more time. We'll remove this just to see what it did. Click review. We have the same number here. That's all right. Let's go back to edit segment. We'll add that filter back. Date added is not within and list time, let's say, the last 60 days. I want to make sure they've been on my list for at least two months before defining them as cold. Let's click review segment and now we can see we have zero contacts that are cold. That's because they were all added within the last 60 days. You want to play with the definition of a cold subscriber for a little bit and make sure to review your segment to make sure that the right people are being added to this segment. There's a lot of different definitions in email marketing and sometimes a certain filter won't do exactly what you expect. Once you're happy with your segments, click save segment. For my client, we had 17,000 subscribers out of 29,000 that were inactive. That's 58%, which is a pretty high percentage. So don't be too surprised if 25 to 75% of your subscribers are cold and disengaged. There is one last thing I want to point out regarding making your own segment. Make sure you're very clear about the requirements to be in the cold segment. One mistake I made with a previous client was creating a segment that said a user who hasn't opened the last 10 emails. Imagine you're a computer. Do you see the problem with this rule? The answer is there's no minimum number of emails. So you could have just signed up yesterday and not opened the first email and you'd still qualify as cold and you could be removed at the end of this process. We obviously don't want that. We want to make sure that the user has received at least a few emails before moving them into the cold subscriber segment. So learn from my mistake and jump into your email provider's live chat if they offer that and confirm that the segment is doing what you want. Now that we've created a dynamic segment, we can create a re-engagement sequence to warm up some cold subscribers. That's what we'll be doing in the next lesson. There's two last things that you can do to make your email list as healthy as possible. Encourage your users to unsubscribe and regularly clean your list. Of course, I'm not saying you want all users to unsubscribe but you do want to encourage the users who will likely go cold and sit on your list hurting your deliverability to unsubscribe. As an example, let's say you have a lead magnet that gets people into your email list and you know that 90% of the people will have made a decision whether to buy your product or service within the next three months. In that case, as you approach the three-month mark, send a few extra emails to see if you can get the sale and also let them know they can unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you. If you want to take it farther, you could even manually remove users at the four-month mark. What we did in this course was very manual. We wrote emails and sent them through our email marketing software. Most email marketing tools have automation. We can take all the emails that we just sent and copy the content and put them into an automation or flow so users can automatically get added to the re-engagement sequence after certain conditions are met. If you use Drip, they have a pre-built sunset workflow that you can install and customize. I wasn't quite happy with that workflow, so I built my own sequence in Drip. In this case, it starts with a bulk operation, meaning I manually add people to the sequence, but then the rest of the sequence is automated. If they haven't opened an email in the last year or read any of the last 10 emails, then they get the entire sequence, marketing re-engagement. After 10 days, they'll be unsubscribed unless they reach one of these goals, clicking a special link, clicking any link, or replying to an email. If you use ConvertKit, you can browse their automation templates. I found an unsubscribe automation that you can add to your account with just a couple clicks. It's not quite as extensive as the sequence of emails we designed in this course, but it is a great starting point. And it's automated. Alternatively, you could set aside a week each year where you clean your list. There's nothing wrong doing things manually as long as you remember to do them. Keep your list healthy by encouraging unsubscribes and cleaning your list regularly, either with automation or doing it manually, maybe once a year. Email marketing is one of the most effective tools in your toolbox. However, it does require some maintenance. The biggest recommendation I have is to regularly email your audience. Maybe that's once a month or maybe it's five times a week. The cadence is specific to your business. However, the important point is to be consistent. You don't want your audience to forget who you are if you take a break for six months. If you're in a company and you have multiple colleagues who can pick up the email slack when you go on vacation, you can probably do a weekly newsletter all year round. But at many smaller businesses, they don't have the coverage. The solution is actually pretty simple. Schedule a few breaks throughout the year. One of my favorite marketing newsletters takes off the entire month of December and July. They let me know the breaks are coming and I expect them. I'm eager and ready to receive their newsletters when they're back in work mode. And from the creator standpoint, it gives you time to reflect on what's working, what's not working, and gives you a chance to make changes to your format without always worrying about producing next week's email. Cold audiences are less likely to open and click your emails and they're more likely to mark you as spam. When you run a re-engagement campaign, you'll only be able to re-engage a percentage of your list. If you email your list consistently, you'll keep your list engaged and you won't have to run a re-engagement campaign. Even with breaks throughout the year, many businesses struggle to come up with content for the newsletter and they skip a few days, then weeks, then months, and then their list turns cold. We really don't want that. So focus on easy-to-create emails. As an example, here's some emails you could write if you run an online store. New Arrivals, Catalog Update, Shop the Outfit, Made in the US, Featured Collection, Back in Stock, Best Reviews, Category Highlight, Sale, Editorial. That's 10 types of emails, only one of which, the editorial email, really requires you to write something original. The rest are pretty easy to write, collecting product photos, descriptions, titles, etc. So it might only take an hour per email once you get your process down. If you're not an e-commerce business, you can still email on a variety of topics. Holiday Seasonal, a digest, tell a story, or a customer showcase, sneak peek, highlighting content on the blog, tips and tricks, or a recent sale. Most of these don't require you to write something original. You can repurpose existing content on your blog or from your catalog. For more content ideas, I recommend you watch Content Creation Strategy & Tools here in the library, as well as Content Marketing Content Ideas for your Editorial Calendar also in the library. The key point is to make sure that you're regularly emailing your readers. Build a system so you don't let your email list go stale. It's better if you start with a reasonable goal, such as a once-a-week email, and then ramp up to a more aggressive goal once you know you can hit the first one. Otherwise, you risk biting off more than you can chew and your list going cold. In the next video, we'll look at how you can automate re-engaging and cleaning your list. Congratulations! Having a warm email list is one of the best assets for a business. The real trick now is keeping your list warm. Make sure that you have a content calendar that makes it easy for you to send consistently. If you want to learn more about content marketing, check out content creation, strategy, and tools in the library, as well as content marketing, content ideas for your editorial calendar, also in the library. If you want to follow me, check out my personal website where I talk about marketing and e-commerce topics. If you want to know how to manage your WordPress website, grow your organic search traffic with WordPress, or grow your e-commerce business, check out some of my courses on LinkedIn Learning, including WordPress SEO and e-commerce fundamentals. You did the hard work of going through and completing the course, so do the easy work and download the certificate and add it to your LinkedIn profile. I'd love to know how this course helped you, so let me know in the Q&A by mentioning your original open rate, how many subscribers you cut, and what your open rate was after you finished warming up the list. Now that you have a sizzling hot email list, your business is on the path to success. So get out there and happy selling!