Just imagine...
You spend several weeks if not months driving traffic to your sites and building your list. For now, you're letting a long autoresponder series take care of the relationship-building. And so you focus on growing your list (and your business) while all the mailings happen on autopilot.
Then one day you realize you've been so busy that you've never even sent out a live broadcast to your list (or if you have, it was months ago). And when you look back on your subscription data, you also realize that the bulk of your mailing list completed the autoresponder series several months ago.
Point is, the bulk of your list hasn't received anything from you in quite some time. And the list has long since grown cold and unresponsive.
Oops.
Despite your best intentions, this can happen to you. As such, my first word of advice is to prevent it. That means you should commit to sending out a live broadcast to your list once per week. If a full schedule or writer's block prevents you from doing this, hire a ghostwriter to create your content. In other words, no excuses.
And if your list does grow cold? Here are a few tips for warming them up again...
Remind Them
When you first email your list again after a long period of absence, you need to remind them of who you are and how they got on your list. As such, you may start that first email with something like,
"Hi [first name],
It's been a while. I'll tell you why in just a moment, but first let me jog your memory. You joined this list on [date] by [how they got on your list] from PM [ip #]. You joined this list because you wanted to learn about [topic].
And that's exactly what you're going to discover today..."
TIP: If people don't remember you, they may be tempted to just hit the "spam" button rather than clicking on the unsubscribe button. As such, you may put your unsubscribe link at the top of the first email and let people know they can leave the list in one click if they'd like... or they can stick around to receive some valuable products for free. Their choice.
Surprise Them
Secondly, you don't want to nail them with a sales pitch in that first email. If you do, it will look like you got behind on your mortgage and you finally got around to emailing them just to squeeze their wallets.
So, instead you should start with a series of emails where you work to re-establish your relationship. Send them highly desirable content and valuable freebies. Later on, you can offer them discounts on hot products.
