Email Marketing Solutions

How I revived a dormant email list just in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday and increased email revenue by 198x!

Dormant email lists are sad. 

It’s so hard to build a good email list and there’s so much potential in one, that seeing a list that’s been ignored brings a tear to my eye.

Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration…

BUT, dormant email lists don’t have to stay that way.

If you take special care and build it back up, you can go from dormant to vibrant in just a couple of months!

Last year I was able to take a dormant email list (one that made less than $200 in July) and revive it so that we were able to make over $32K in revenue from email in November.

Oh and by September we had increased email revenue to over $5800. More than 30x growth in just two months.

Here’s how I did it…

Identifying Which Subscribers are MOST Likely to Engage with Email

Good email strategy always starts with your engaged segment.

But how do you figure out who’s engaged if you haven’t emailed your list in two months? Or more…

We had to get creative.

First, I backtracked and looked for any subscribers who had opened or clicked any of the last 5 emails that we sent out. Even if some of those emails were over 90 days ago.

Then I looked at other metrics that would indicate that a subscriber has a higher than normal chance of engaging with emails that we send out.

Things like…

• Active on site
• New to the list
• Added to cart

All in all, I ended up identifying about 13K subscribers from a list of 45K that were likely to engage with my emails.

Moved Pop-Up To Klaviyo and Optimized

One of our big issues was that we were getting only a few number subscribers each month.

The original pop-up was through Shopify (I think) but without having exact numbers on it, I can only guess what the conversion rate was.

So I had the brand move their pop-up to Klaviyo so that I could update the copy, track conversions, and test.

I ended up getting the pop-up to convert around 4-5% which almost 10x’ed the revenue that we were getting from the Welcome emails.

(There were some other factors at play here too, like improving deliverability, but without touching the welcome flow… the main driver was pop-up conversion.)

Started Sending Out Weekly Emails

As I mapped out campaign ideas, I wanted to start slow.

No better way to compound issues than trying to blast a dormant email list with 3-4 emails a week right out of the gate.

I focused on one email per week for the first month.

I looked for topics and themes that would be interesting/important to this brand’s subscriber list and wrote four emails around those themes.

For each email we tested different things… We tested subject lines, sending dates/times, and template formats. (Turns out my best performing email was almost plain text with no header image.)

My first four emails had an average open rate of 55% and an average CTR of .55%.

Not the best numbers, but not bad for a dormant list. 

Most importantly, along with our modified engaged segment, I now had a baseline for who was going to open and click on my emails and a foundation to start growing.

Increased Sending Frequency and Looked to Re-Engaged

Now that we had our foundations in place, it was time to start growing.

We increased our sending frequency to twice a week and used some of those extra emails to try and re-engage our unengaged segment.

There were a few emails that we sent to our entire list, and one or two that we sent just to the unengaged segment.

This included a few specific sales and some topical themes that I knew would stand out in the inbox.

We got a larger than normal level of unsubscribes during this period, but we replaced those who were leaving our list with new subscribers thanks to our improved pop-up.

Set Up Dedicated Sending Domain

Things were going along great, until one day I tested a campaign and it went to my SPAM folder.

I tweaked and tested again… still my SPAM folder.

Turns out the email was failing the DMARC check.

Without getting into the nitty gritty of email deliverability… the short version is that when you are on a shared sending domain in Klaviyo, you cannot have DMARC set up.

This brand needed a DMARC policy set up because they were using their domain to send emails for other sales reasons (a practice I would avoid…) 

So the best solution was to set up a dedicated sending domain.

Since I had been sending campaign emails for over a month now, I didn’t need to worry too much about the warm-up process.

BUT… I did need to keep a closer eye on our deliverability metrics.

Things like bounce rates, SPAM complaints, and of course engagement.

Being on a dedicated sending domain meant that we couldn’t rely on the strength of others to boost our sending reputation… it was all on what I did.

Created Strategic Campaign Calendars

Finally game time was here.

Time to make a plan for BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday.) 

We were somewhat still limited by the number of emails that we could send without overloading our subscribers. I had gotten up to two emails per week, and didn’t want to go higher than 3.

So I mapped out a campaign calendar using the brand’s different promotions to provide structure.

Ensured that we stayed within 3 emails per week at the most, while including key emails to maximize each promotion.

During this time, I focused ONLY on our engaged segment.

It gets harder to inbox during high promotional times like BFCM and I wanted to make sure that we were hitting the inbox.

Fortunately, through my re-engagement efforts and new sign-ups, our engaged list had more than doubled from what I started with.

Final result… $32,715 in revenue from email in November with $13,635 coming from campaign emails. A 3x boost in campaign revenue from November of 2021… 

And a boost of 198x from email revenue when I took over!

Summary – TL;DR

>>Identified Which Subscribers are MOST Likely to Engage with Email

>>Moved Pop-Up To Klaviyo and Optimized

>>Increased Sending Frequency and Looked to Re-Engaged

>>Set Up Dedicated Sending Domain

>>Created Strategic Campaign Calendars

What Should YOU do Next?

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2. Leave a like or a comment on this post to let me know what you thought. What segments would you add?
3. If you need someone to build out a high-performing welcome flow for your brand or business, send me an email at ben@henkenmarketing.com or fill out this form and I’ll be in touch.
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