They say “the money is in the list” and that’s true … IF you send the right emails to your list!

But what happens when you take the time (and spend the money) to build a list and then the list goes cold?

• No opens.

• No clicks.

• No sales.

It’s not a pretty sight. All that time, money, and hope down the drain.

The good news is ..

There is a solution!

Today I want to share with you three ways to warm up a cold mailing list.

No matter how cold your list is, or how long it has been since you emailed them, many of them can be brought back into your world.

• They will engage again.

• They will follow you on social media again.

• They will open again.

• They will click again.

• They will buy again.

• They will recommend you again.

And those are beautiful things indeed!

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. This is Charlie Page, and welcome to episode two of Common Sense Digital Marketing.

I’m on a mission.

My mission is to simplify the process of digital marketing so that you can get real results quickly.

Today what I want to talk about are three ways to warm up a cold mailing list.

I speak with a lot of clients who have a mailing list they haven’t mailed them for a long time.

Sometimes they have 300 or 500 or 30 or, in one case, we had 3000 people on a mailing list and this particular lady had not mailed them in a long time.

She said to me, “Is my list dead? Is there anything that we can do to warm it up and to turn this thing around?” I said, “Yeah. Absolutely. There are some things we can do. ”Today what I want to do is share with you the top three ways to warm up a cold mailing list.

So if you have a mailing list of any size and if you haven’t mailed them even in a year, even longer than that, these techniques work wonderfully well and they really don’t cost you anything to do. All right. Let’s get right into it.

Three ways to warm up a cold mailing list.

Number one, content. 

Back in 1996, way back in 1996, Bill Gates said, “Content is king,” and how right he was. We look at the explosion of content that’s taken place over the past number of years and we can see that people just can’t get enough content.

The more content you put out, the better.

But who has the time, right? How do you have the time to write 2000-word long articles, because that’s what Google prefers, or publish to your blog every day or send out emails every day? It’s hard to do. So what you have to do is you have to find shortcuts.

You have to find ways to do it quicker. Now, number one, not all content has to be super long, what’s called cornerstone content.

We’ll talk about that in another episode, what different types of content work well in different situations.

But for this situation today, warming up a cold mailing list, let’s talk about what type of content you should put out there. 

Okay. Number one, the content should be short.

We’re talking three or 400 words in an email. We’re not talking about the Magna Carta. It’s not a really long document. You just want to provide your best, most actionable, most helpful information, kind of like what I’m doing today, inside an email. Now, how often should you send this content?

You should send it every day. Here’s why.

• You’re not pitching anything.

• You’re not selling anything.

• You’re not bugging anybody. 

You’re helping them with a problem they’ve already expressed that they have.

So they joined your mailing list in the first place to solve a problem because you were offering something that they valued.

It might have been free. It might have been paid. But they got on your list not by mistake, they weren’t just going to lunch at Subway and all of a sudden they tripped over your list and joined it.

No, they decided to join your mailing list based on an offer you were making. If you’re providing content that’s consistent, that’s congruent with the offer you made in the beginning, then you’re good to go.

Now, you can curate content just as easily as you can create content. I suggest a balance of the two. Curation is simply using small bits of other people’s content with attribution.

You say, “This is where I discovered this.” You link back to them. You do that ethically and this way you get the best of the best content in the world and all you do is gather it up like a curator at a museum.

He or she doesn’t go out and dig up the artifacts. They’re not over in Egypt digging under the pyramids. What they’re doing is they’re bringing you the information.

They’re curating all of the best information, gathering it into one place. That’s what curation is when it comes to content marketing.

Method number one, content and lots of it. Helpful content, actionable content, your best ideas, the best ideas you have, the most actionable ideas. If you don’t want to create it yourself, no problem. You can curate it.

Now, one other thing before we move on from point number one, which is content, one other thing and this is important. You can put calls to action in your content lightly.

In other words, you don’t want a big, heavy-duty sales pitch. “10 reasons my product’s the best product in the whole world. Why my product is better than sliced bread.”

That’s not really content. That’s a sales pitch. What you want to do is give them something actionable that will help them. It’ll give them results in advance, and when you do that you build good will. But there’s nothing wrong, in fact there’s everything right with adding subtle calls to action inside your content.

So if you’re talking about list-building for example, since we’re talking about a list. Let’s say you’ve got an article that you’ve written or you’ve curated about list-building. You can put a line in that says, “You want the best list-building tool in the world? Click here.”

That could be your product. It could be an affiliate link. Nobody’s going to be offended by that because it’s subtle. It’s not overt. If you provide great quality, actionable content you’re going to bless your list members and they’re going to start warming up.

They’re going to start saying, “Oh. I should have been listening to this person all along.” So method number one is content.

Provide helpful, useful, actionable content. Teach them how to do something. They’ll love you forever.

Method number two is to ask them a question. 

One of the ways in which you can tell that a cold mailing list is becoming warmer is when more people engage.

Now that means opening your email, but it also means clicking in the link inside the email.

So here’s a question that a lot of people who are new to email marketing are asking. “How can I get people to click on my emails? How can I get them to open it up, read it, and click it?”

Because if they don’t click it, what’s the point of sending the email, right?

One of the best ways that I know to get people to click an email is to ask them a question and then provide a link so they can see the answer. That’s called a one-click survey. A lot of people ask the question of me, “What question do I ask them? If I’m going to do a one-click survey where I’m asking a very interesting question and then I provide a couple of links where they can click to register their opinion and to see the answer, what do I ask?”

Well, let’s talk about the digital marketing world because that’s the world I’m in. A lot of people want to know how to drive traffic, right?

So a question could be, “What is the most cost-effective way to drive traffic?” Answer number one, and you would put a link here, would be paid advertising. Answer number two would be content marketing. Answer number three would be your own affiliate program. Now the way you make this work is those links go to a page that you create that talks about those methods.

If you’ve got content you can share in these areas, great. If you don’t, you can curate some really great content, and you create three simple landing pages. They could be blog posts.

If you’re using ClickFunnels, they could be pages on ClickFunnels or Leadpages or another page builder. Any page on the Internet would do, they could even be YouTube videos.

It really doesn’t matter.

What you’re looking for is the click.

What you’re looking for is to count the number of clicks that people do so that you can tell where they’re interested. Let’s say we’re going to run this one-click survey approach. What we’re going to do is we’re going to say, “What’s the most cost-effective way to get traffic?” The first link is paid advertising.

And then they click here to register their vote. When they click, they go to, let’s say, a YouTube video you found about doing paid advertising, or an article you’ve written, or even a product that you want to promote. Link number two would be solo ads, let’s say.

Well, again, you could send them to a YouTube video. You could send them to an article you’ve written, or you could send them to a product you want to promote. So this is the technique in a nutshell. I have an entire teaching about this. It’s video-based. It’ll explain it much, much better. But basically what you do is you ask a very compelling question. “How can I tell if my dog is in pain?

Number one, give them an examination.

Number two, take them to the vet.

Number three, look for these symptoms. 

These links, they go to pages you’ve created or resources you recommend. So that’s method number two.

To warm up a cold mailing list, you want to do content, that’s method one.

Number two, you want to ask them a question.

But more than ask them a question, you want them to register their opinion by clicking a link. Best way to do that, SurveyMonkey-type of tool or a one-click survey.

Okay, method number three for warming up a cold mailing list is providing them with gifts. 

That’s right. 

You’re giving them a gift.

Everybody likes to receive something free. Everybody likes to receive a gift. There’s absolutely nothing wrong.

In fact, there’s everything right with providing free gifts to the people on your mailing list.

This is what gets opens and clicks more than anything else. Now, a lot of people say to me, “Well, I don’t know what to give away.”

The easy answer is you go to a private label rights site and you purchase a private label rights product that you have the right to give away. 

Really, you probably have 100 PLR products on your hard drive right now. Most people I talk to, do. So most people have bought some kind of private label rights product, a PLR product.

They have the right to give it away.

They’ve just never modified it to use it to sell it. Their intention was to modify it and sell it, but they never got around to it. We can turn that trash into cash right now by taking that and making it a free gift that you give to people on your list.

If you don’t have something like that, I’m telling you you can find great private label rights products for five or 10 dollars, and that’s a great investment in your mailing list. Find something in the private label rights world that you can give away for free. If you have time to modify it, put your name on it, great. If not, just give it to them like it is. Find something that’s in your area of interest.

So if your mailing list is about cooking, you don’t really want to do one about weightlifting. Find something’s that consistent with what your list is about, and give it to them.

As a matter of fact, find 10 if you can. Find 20 if you can.

You’ll be surprised at how warm your list gets, how quickly it gets warm if you start sending out gift announcements three times a week. Now, I know that sounds like a lot, so start with one. But if you send them a series of gifts, and these are things that you know are high-quality and you’re giving it to them for free, they’re going to begin opening your email, and they’re going to begin clicking.

Those are three ways to warm up a cold mailing list. Number one, provide lots of helpful content. If you can’t create the content or don’t have time or don’t want to, curate the content.

No problem there. Also, be sure to include a little call to action link so that you get some clicks. If you want to promote products doing it that way, that’s perfectly fine. Number two, run an ask campaign or a survey. You can do a one-click survey or you use a tool like a SurveyMonkey or some other Google Forms type of tool. And number three, give things away.

Give them gifts for free. Everybody likes to receive a gift.

You’ll show them that you care. You might be saying that you care about them right now, but showing them that you care by giving them something free, especially of high value, especially that’s consistent with what your list is about, that really works. This is Charlie Page. Go out and use those three ways of warming up your cold list today and beginning soon, you’ll have a warm list that’ll turn into a hot list, and then you’ll begin building a list of buyers.

That is a beautiful thing indeed.

I’ll see you on the next episode.