Recover a Dead Email List With a 12 Week Value Detox
Somebody bragged on Facebook about deleting two-thirds of their email list, twenty thousand subscribers who’d stopped opening emails, and called it smart housekeeping. I think it’s one of the worst moves you can make with a list, and in this episode I’ll walk through why, plus the twelve-week process I use to bring a dead list back to life instead. Here’s the episode.
Today I want to share something a little different. Something more specific, but broad at the same time. Something that can massively change the way that you do marketing and how much money you make. A handful of years ago, about five, I discovered a secret that so few people know, it hasn’t really become mainstream knowledge since its inception over a decade ago. Keep absorbing the information in this episode, and I’ll tell you.
Let me tell you something that happened to me the other day. I was on Facebook, browsing a little bit, and I saw a message that went something like this: “Time for some internal housekeeping. I just deleted two-thirds of my email list. 20,000 subscribers who never opened my emails.” I was actually a little bit shocked, and there are two things that are really wrong with this.
Two Things Wrong With Deleting Subscribers
Firstly, open rates on emails fluctuate all the time. Your unresponsive subscribers don’t suddenly stop using their email accounts, most of the time. They’re still seeing your emails in them, mostly. The only difference is they’ve chosen to ignore them, because it’s an unconscious response towards you. They automatically, without even thinking about it, ignore your specific emails while they continue to open mine, because they associate your emails with pain, with sales pitches, or with something they don’t want, most likely because you’ve tried to sell too much without giving anything away in return. So they feel no obligation to open them.
The second thing that’s wrong with deleting email subscribers is that those subscribers may eventually start opening your emails again, especially if you adjust your strategy. Now, I’m not saying to never clean your list. What I’m saying is, be careful who you listen to. I find it hilarious when I see people deleting unresponsive subscribers in giant numbers over short periods of time. It’s as if the subscribers have died. But they haven’t.
Here’s the secret, and you might actually have figured this out by now. The responsiveness of the people that you communicate with is going to fluctuate with time, depending on what’s going on, and depending also on what you’re doing. Period. Therefore, the responsiveness of your subscriber list will fluctuate as well. And you shouldn’t ever delete that unresponsive list. You should do something else with it instead. That might seem like common sense to some of you, but it’s not.
I’ve seen people whose lists have gone from a 35% open rate over time down to under 2%. And it stayed there for a while. This is where people delete those unresponsive subscribers. And then they shot back up to 20% later. Well, how’d they do that? They changed their strategy to being valuable and interesting through value-based marketing. They went from focusing on selling first to giving value before the offer is presented. The reality is that your open rates will go down to 2%, 3%, maybe even less, if all you do is send out constant, never-ending promotions all the time, with no value that you’re adding to the person’s life.
The Typical Responsiveness Cycle of an Email List
The typical responsiveness cycle of an email list goes something like this. It’ll start high, almost always. Your first email that you send to a list will get opened 30%, 40%, 50%, even 60%, 70% of the time. Then it goes down to around 20%, usually within about a month. By the six-week mark, you’re at about 15%. After eight weeks in, maybe you’re getting 5% to 15% on people who joined eight weeks ago. And that list used to be opening 50% plus of the time, just shy of a couple of months ago. What’s wrong with this scenario? It’s a colossal waste of time, energy, and money to market in a way where people stop opening their emails.
What am I really getting at here? Switch to a value-based marketing strategy. Give value, which is solutions to problems. Focus on helping your subscribers. Become their trusted advisor before you ask them to give you money for something, and especially before you just non-stop, never-endingly pitch them. When you do it this way, a few things happen. You’re going to start making way more sales, especially over time. People start to like you. You become like a celebrity in their eyes. Giving away content before they buy your stuff makes people think that your paid stuff is even better. And the reality? It doesn’t even have to be better, but it should be, because they’ll still thank you after they buy it, because they enjoy giving you money. Why do they enjoy it? It’s because you’ve created reciprocity.
The 12-Week Detox
The good news is that you can recover from an unresponsive email list with a process I call the 12-week detox. Within around 12 weeks, you can recover an open rate from 4% to 7% back to right around 20%, sometimes even higher, depending on how badly you screwed it up in the first place.
Here’s how you can do that. The first thing you want to do is be a little bit different and interesting, and create a daily value-based email that gives people a solution to their problem before you even ask them for money. Even more effective, create a daily value-based piece of content that actually doesn’t sell anything. A blog post, an article, or a video, and send that out to your list, every single day, at least five days a week. Talking to you guys who send out tens of millions of emails per month: the most effective email marketing strategy for content-based emails is to send them daily. Sending them daily will make sure the subscribers who never open your emails start to open them. When they notice that you’re doing something different, they’ll slowly become more responsive over time. It’s actually just as simple as that.
People like Eric Worre, The Sovereign Man, me, we have some of the most responsive email lists in the whole world, because we send out daily value-based emails. In fact, since we started this daily show, our open rates for our entire subscriber base have just been climbing, just like I’m describing in this episode. People actually look forward to their emails, because they know something useful is inside.
The powerful part is that when you’re sending people to a blog post, to a video, to something that’s your value, your uniqueness, you can have banners and promotional links around the content that lead people back into your sales funnel. You can also retarget the content clicks into a sales funnel; digital marketers have done testing on that and found that it increases conversions. You could also do behavioral-based email campaigns.
After enough exposures, and trust me, I want you to listen, people will continue to come back for the content even if they’re not your buyers. They will click through to your sales processes over and over and over again. They’ll start watching your sales video thinking about you differently. Instead of thinking about you like a pitch artist, they’re going to think about you like, “this is my doctor giving me advice about my health.” People normally send every email straight back to the same sales page, but people don’t want to go back to the same sales message all the time.
When you send subscribers to blog content, they realize that you’re actually giving them things that make their lives better, especially if the content is good, well thought out, and you put in your time, your heart, your soul. They’ll keep coming back, they’ll keep reading it, and then they’ll keep clicking through to that same sales funnel again and again. And eventually you will get people to buy. Sometimes people will buy after they read 30 of your blog posts and click through to the sales video the fifth time. I was actually reading a case study just the other week where retargeting campaigns were going out based on the number of pages people had viewed on a site, and they found that once somebody was 20 or 30 pages into a site, they could literally spend a dollar and get back about 50, because those people that had read that content were so responsive.
I have guys on my list who have bought something for the first time after two years, after three years, after four, after five years. I don’t hear stories like that from almost any marketer online. It’s because I sell from value first. I give them something, and what that does is it makes them respond to me, and then when I have something they want, they buy it. See, this can cure an unresponsive email list. It can save you thousands of dollars and countless time. And in the end, this is just a better marketing strategy. No other strategy will get so many subscribers to continue to go back to the same sales process and buy on the fifth, on the tenth, on the hundredth exposure.
I’m actually friends with a lot of people who do email marketing, and I’ve had arguments with them about this. They say, “Every time that I test this, Dave, I send more emails and it sells more stuff.” And I respond back and I say, “Okay, who are the wealthiest people online?” And they pause, and they think about it. And then they think about brand-name celebrities. People like Eric Worre, Brendan Burchard, people like Frank Kern, people like myself. And all of them do something entirely different. What they do is they build a responsive list over time. So while their income continues to increase, you slam your list and slam your list and slam your list, and it eventually just costs you more and more money. Even though it makes you more money at first, it makes you less money in six months, and you have to spend more money for a bigger list.
Full episode transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Hey there, my friends. My name's Dave Wood, and today I want to share something a little different in this episode of The Daily Shortcut. Something more specific, but broad at the same time. Something that can massively change the way that you do marketing and how much money you make. A handful of years ago, about five, I discovered a secret.
A secret that so few people know, it hasn't really become mainstream knowledge since its inception over a decade ago. The secret? Keep absorbing the information in this episode, and I'll tell you. Let's see if you can get it right in the comments. I want you to pay attention because as you do, you may realize something incredibly powerful.
Something that causes a fundamental shift inside of you. Let me tell you something that happened to me the other day. I was on Facebook browsing a little bit, and I saw a message that went something like this. Time for some internal housekeeping. I just deleted two-thirds of my email list.
20,000 subscribers who never opened my emails. I was actually a little bit shocked, and there are two things that are really wrong with this. Firstly, open rates on emails, they fluctuate all the time. Your unresponsive subscribers don't suddenly stop using their email accounts most of the time. They're using the same email accounts, and they're still seeing your emails in them, mostly.
The only difference is... They've chosen to ignore them, and not open them, and it's because it's an unconscious response towards you. They automatically, without even thinking about it, ignore your specific emails while they continue to open mine. Just because they associate your emails with pain, with sales pitches, or with something they don't want, most likely because you've tried to sell too much without giving anything away in return. So they feel no obligation to open them.
The second thing that's wrong with deleting email subscribers is that those subscribers may eventually start opening your emails again. Especially if you adjust your strategy. Now, I'm not saying to never clean your list. What I'm saying is, be careful who you listen to. I find it hilarious when I see people deleting unresponsive subscribers in giant numbers over short periods of time.
I watch them, fascinated by their actions, wondering why. It's as if they're subscribed, and the subscribers have died, but they haven't. Here's the secret that you might actually have figured this out by now. The responsiveness of the people that you communicate with is going to fluctuate with time, depending on what's going on, and depending also on what you're doing. Period.
Therefore, the responsiveness of your subscriber list will fluctuate as well. And you shouldn't ever delete that unsubscriber list. You should do something else with it instead. Now, that might seem like common sense to some of you, but it's not. Now, I can't show you an exact example, because I'm talking in a visual video, but I've seen people whose lists have gone from a 35% open rate over time, down to under 2%.
And it stayed there for a while. This is where people delete those unresponsive subscribers to try to get that 2% a little bit bigger in their list. And then they shot back up to 20% later. Well, how'd they do that? They changed their strategy to being valuable.
They changed their strategy to being valuable and interesting through value-based marketing. They went from focusing on selling first, to giving value before the exchange or before the offer is presented. The reality is that your open rates will go down to 2%, 3%, maybe even less, if all you do is just send out constant, never-ending promotions all the time, with no value that you're adding to the person's life. The typical responsiveness cycle of an email list goes something like this, like I'm about to describe. It'll start high, almost always, all the time.
Your first email that you send to a list will get opened 30%, 40%, 50%, even 60%, 70% of the time. Then it goes down to around 20%, usually within about a month. By the six-week mark, you're at about 15%. After eight weeks in, maybe you're getting 5% to 15% on people who joined eight weeks ago. And that list used to be opening 50% plus of the time, just shy of a couple of months ago.
What's wrong with this scenario? It's a colossal waste of time, energy, and money to market in a way where people stop opening their emails. What am I really getting at here? Well, switch to a value-based marketing strategy. Give value, which is solutions to problems.
Focus on helping your subscribers. Become their trusted advisor before you ask them to give you money for something, and especially before you just non-stop, never-endingly pitch them. When you do it this way, a few things happen. Number one, you're going to start making way more sales, especially over time. People start to like you.
You become like a celebrity in their eyes. Giving away content before they buy your stuff makes people think that your paid stuff is even better. And the reality? It doesn't even have to be better, but it should be because they'll still thank you after they buy it because they enjoy giving you money. Why do they enjoy it?
It's because you've created reciprocity. The good news is that you can recover from an unresponsive email list with a process I call the 12-week detox. Within around 12 weeks, you can recover an open rate from 4% to 7% to back actually right around 20%, sometimes even higher, depending on how badly you screwed it up in the first place. Here's how you can do that. First thing you want to do is you want to be a little bit different and interesting, and you want to create a daily value-based email that gets sent out, that gives people something that's a solution to their problem before you even ask them for money.
Even more effective, create a daily value-based piece of content that actually doesn't sell anything and just gives people more value. A blog post, an article or video, and send that out to your list, giving them value, right? Every single day, at least five days a week. Talking to you guys who send out tens of millions of emails per month, the most effective email marketing strategy for content-based emails is to send them daily. Sending them daily will make sure the subscribers who never open your emails will start to open them, and when they notice that you're sending things, they see that you're doing something different, and they'll slowly become more responsive over time.
It's actually just as simple as that. People like Eric Worre, The Sovereign Man, me, we have some of the most responsive email lists in the whole world because we send out daily value-based emails. In fact, since we started this daily shortcut, our open rates for our entire subscriber base have just been climbing as we've continued to make this, just like I'm describing in this episode. People actually look forward to their emails because they know something useful is inside, and they know they're going to change if they just read them and click on the links. The powerful part is that when you're sending people to a blog post, to a video, to something that's your value, your uniqueness, you can have banners, you can have promotional links around the content that lead people back into your sales funnel.
You can also retarget the content, click into a sales funnel. Digital marketing has done testing on that and found that it increases conversions. You could also do behavioral-based email campaigns. After enough exposures, and trust me, I want you to listen, people will continue to come back for the content even if they're not your buyers. They will click through to your sales processes over and over and over again.
They'll start watching your sales video thinking about you differently. Instead of thinking about you like a pitch artist, they're going to think about you like, this is my doctor giving me advice about my health. People normally do send their list to a sales page and every other email they send out goes straight back to the same sales page. But people don't want to go back to the same sales message all the time unless they're choosing to go back there or they're being retargeted based on creating responsiveness. When you send subscribers to your page, to blog content, what happens is they realize that you're actually giving them things that make their lives better, especially if the content is good, well thought out, and you take your time, your heart, your soul.
They'll keep coming back, they'll keep reading it, and then they'll keep clicking through to that same sales funnel again and again. And eventually you will get people to buy if you do things like that from years, years ago. And that's what happens to me. Sometimes people will buy after they read 30 of your blog posts and click through to the sales video the fifth time. I was actually reading a case study just the other week where there was retargeting campaigns that were going out based on the numbers of pages people had viewed on a site.
And they found that once somebody was 20 or 30 pages into a site, they could literally spend a dollar and get back about 50 because those people that had read that content were so responsive. People that continue to come back to this continue to become more responsive over time. They keep coming back, they keep getting value, and they just decide to buy because of it the one day when they need your product. See, that's the power of the daily shortcut. Without you having to spend hours researching and writing valuable content, you can actually deliver valuable daily content to your email list or your followers on social media.
Every Monday through Friday, we release these episodes that deliver high quality value that you can use in your business to attract more customers to you with their credit card in hand, ready to buy. It's the best way to sell a single product ever. I have guys on my list who have bought something literally they bought it for the first time after two years, after three years, after four, after five years. Why have they done that? I don't hear stories like that from almost any marketer online.
It's because I sell from value first. In other words, I give them something and what that does is it makes them respond to me and then when I have something they want, they buy it. See, this can cure an unresponsive email list. It can save you thousands of dollars. It can save you countless time and ultimately, this is just a better marketing strategy.
No other strategy will get so many subscribers to continue to go back to the same sales process and buy on the fifth, on the tenth, on the hundredth exposure. I'm actually friends with a lot of people who do email marketing and I've had arguments with them about this. They say, every time that I test this, Dave, I send more emails and it sells more stuff. And I respond back and I say, okay, who are the wealthiest people online? And they pause and they think about it.
And then they think about brand name celebrities. People like Eric Worre, Brendan Burchard, people like Frank Kern, people like myself. And all of them do something entirely different. Because what they do is they build a responsive list over time. So while their income continues to increase, while you slam your list and slam your list and slam your list, it eventually just costs you more and more and more money.
Even though it makes you more money at first, it makes you less money in six months and you have to spend more money for a bigger list. See, I want to share with you the easiest way to deliver value-based content to your followers. Pay attention to what I'm about to share and I want you to use this wisely. Every day and with every daily shortcut, I want to help you tap into a greater purpose that's filled with wealth, that's filled with prosperity, and that's filled with freedom. We've developed three bonus shortcuts to help you continue to grow and move towards that goal.
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