Sending Your First Campaign To An Old Email List?
July 26, 2006 – 9:18 amA lot of our customers have been collecting email addresses on their websites from day one. They just haven’t been contacting those email addresses from day one, because they didn’t know how to send email newsletters. Or maybe they just never had the time.
Then, they find MailChimp.
"Eureka! Now I can start emailing to my whole list!"
Not so fast. If that list is older than, say, 6 months, you need to re-introduce yourself to those recipients.
Email addresses (and the permission that goes along with them) go stale after about 6 months. So you can’t just assume that the list you’ve been sitting on for 3 years is going to be perfectly fine to start sending full blown newsletters to. If you just start sending emails to an old list, you’ll run into all sorts of problems, like:
"Who the F*#$ are you, and how the F#*& did you get my email?"
Nobody remembers signing up to some email list a year ago. We’ve all surfed around the Internet, found something kinda-sorta interesting, and signed up for newsletters. But if you take more than 3 months to send the 1st email, nobody will remember who the heck you are. Prepare for tons of spam complaints and abuse reports. It only takes a handful of complaints to get blacklisted by major ISPs.
High Bounce Rates
At MailChimp, we can easily identify a "first-time-send-to-a-stale-list." They typically get a 20-35% bounce back rate (when something under 10% is normal). The important thing here is to use a system that automatically cleans your list of bounced emails. Otherwise, if you keep sending to undeliverable addresses, servers will start blocking your messages.
Optin-Shock
Let’s say you visit a tiny little Yahoo store to buy some kind of obscure gift for your anniversary. It was a nice website, with cool little gifts. You buy a trinket for your wife and leave. 3 years later, that Yahoo store has grown into a huge e-commerce portal with millions of customers. They’ve installed an extremely powerful email marketing system, and they’re finally ready to send email offers and promotions to their customers. Hey, according to CAN-SPAM, they’ve got a "prior business relationship" with you, so they’re allowed to do it right? How would you feel if you suddenly started receiving weekly "e-blasts" and 5-page long newsletters from them? (see above: Who the F&*^ are you?) Problem is, you probably would have enjoyed a few emails from these guys. But suddenly receiving ginormous email offers every other day is crossing the line.
The Re-Introduction Email
So here’s our advice for when you’re about to send your first email to an old list. Start with a re-introduction email. Remind them of who you are, and what you do. Remind them that a while back, they actually requested email newsletters, or special offers, from your company. If you can, merge in some data, like their signup date, to jog their memory. Did they purchase something from you? Merge that in too.
Tell them that you’re finally getting around to sending emails, and you’d like ‘em to stay on the list, because you’re going to send some nice offers. Here’s an example:
Hi *|FNAME|*,
Remember us? You visited our website back on *|OPTIN_DATE|* and signed up for our email newsletter. Well, we’ve finally gotten around to setting up a nifty email newsletter program, and we want to make sure you still want to receive news from us. We hope you do, because every month or so, our newsletter will include useful how-tos, tips, and advice, plus special offers (like the one below). Of course, we don’t want to clog up your inbox with stuff you don’t want, so feel free to click the "unsubscribe" link below, and you’ll never hear from us again…
No thanks, remove me from your list.
The example above is basically a gentle reminder of who you are, and it provides a very prominent unsubscribe link. Another option is to require people to RE-SUBSCRIBE to your list. Instead of an unsub link, you’d use a "Sign me up" link. You’ll lose more emails this way (we’ve done it a handful of times for different clients, and they usually lost 30-50% of their lists), but the list will end up being much, much cleaner, and way more responsive.
The key is not to suddenly shock your recipients by sending full-blown newsletters out of the blue. That’s like seeing an old high school girlfriend in a crowd, and running up to her and planting a big wet kiss on her. You gotta start with, "hey, remember me?" If you don’t re-introduce yourself, you better hope she’s not carrying pepper spray.
