CASE STUDY: How To Reactivate A Dead List

After nearly three and a half years of zero contact, this is how I brought a dead list back to life, turning them into active subscribers, and soon to be loyal fans.

A Raine Report customer here contacted me a few months ago asking for help to bring back a list he had not mailed to for over three years.

This is what we did to achieve it.

The list had 6,472 emails with first names that had been collected in InfusionSoft (now Keep) and was in the sports-betting niche. The list was exported in February 2001 and the InfusionSoft account closed down.

Rav shutdown his business at the beginning of 2001, a year into the pandemic as it had stopped making money and he was disillusioned with the niche.

Fast-forward several years, the world has changed somewhat, and sports betting is now legal, and is a massive industry in the USA.

Rav decided to give it another go.

The first thing I did was to look up where in the world his list came from. At the time the list was built, sports-betting was mostly illegal in the USA so I wanted to see where his customers came from.

Some of the export data from InfusionSoft had a country code but not all, so I wrote a script to do IP=To-Country lookup on the list.

61% of the list were from the US, 31% from the UK, 7% from Australia and New Zealand, and just 1% from the rest of the world.

So we split the list in two for now. The US, and the UK and the rest of the world for now.

Now a lot has changed over the last few years, you no longer have to pay a fortune (or anything) for mail services until you reach a decent list size. But I also wanted to make sure we removed and dead or bouncing emails first before adding them to a service, so I ran the through an online-testing service, which although not 100% reliable is better than not at all.

I got 5331 back.

The next step was creating an account on Systeme.io and uploading the two lists. They both went into the same list but were tagged with US and ROW (rest of world). This was only going to be a short-term solution as Rav was planning to eventually launch a SubStack newsletter but wanted to have an active list first.

(You can just import a list into SubStack but that will probably get you banned for sending too many failed emails / complaints etc.)

Next up I created a second list, this was for active subscribers, we will get to that later.

So the first step was to write four ‘I have been away for a while’ emails scheduled a few days apart. Each one telling them what to expect in the future and also asking them to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in sports-betting.

Then the next step was a free report email. This offered them a free report to download as a welcome back gift.

But let me explain the process.

If the subscriber opened any of the ‘I have been away for a while’ emails then they were tagged with ‘Active Now’ and removed from the ‘I have been away for a while’ sequence.

Subscribers with ‘Active Now’ are then added to a new sequence to give away the free report, this consists of 5 emails explaining what's in the report with a download link.

The first of these emails is sent instantly. So if they have just opened any of the ‘I have been away for a while’ emails, they will INSTANTLY get another email with the free report while they are in their email client reading their email. (this is the key to this process working)

If they click on the download link in any of the emails they receive then they are removed from the sequence and put into the active list.

You now have an list of email subscribers who have taken action.

So what about people who’s email clients block open notifications?

Simple, you add a line with a link to emails 3-4 with a ‘I have a free report for you’ that triggers the Active Now tag and sends them to a page which says ‘You should have an email arriving in your inbox with the download link’.

So why not put the link in the first two emails?

If you have not been active for a while then Google and other emails providers will be treating you with suspicion, and that is why it is best not to provide a link straight away.

You could also ask them to reply with ‘Yes’ to get a free report which will increase your deliverability but that is not as simple to setup.

How did this do?

After the first four emails went out, 29% of the list became active. We ran the same sequence again exactly one month later but changed up the subject lines and got another 22% of the list active. It started running again at the end of last week and I think it should get 8-10% more (the last email will be sent tomorrow).

If you are wondering why they were tagged with US or ROW when the emails were imported, it is because there were two versions of the report written, one with US specific information etc.

I just thought I would write up this little experiment, if you found it useful then give it a like.