Clients ask me this a lot…

“I have a list of email addresses that I haven’t talked to in a while. What’s the best way to reach out to them without hurting my deliverability score or damaging my sender reputation?”

Here are the steps you should follow as you reach out to your cold or inactive email list.

1) Clean Up Your List

You need to clean up your list. By cleaning up, I mean you should use an email validation tool like NeverBounce or Email List Verify. The edge on price goes to, Email List Verify, but they both provide a similar service. You upload your email list to their platform and they verify the email addresses. They do this by pinging the email address as if they were sending a real email to them. Based upon the feedback they get back from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. after the ping, they can tell if an email address is valid, invalid, or a ‘catch-all’ type of email address.

When you get the results, only use the resulting valid list… that’s the group you can reach out to.

Without fail, you will be sad because you just lost 5-25% of your “Emailable” list, but those email addresses were crap that you should not be sending to. If this is your first time doing this, you will be tempted to send to the people you lost. DO NOT!

2) Set the Schedule

Now that you have your audience, you need to break them up into smaller chunks. Sending to the whole list all at once is a BAD IDEA.

If you have a small list of 1,000 or fewer, I’d break it up into 4 groups and only send to one group per day. As your list gets larger, there is more to consider, though.

As a general rule, I never send to more than 10% of my list in any given day. So, if you have a list of 300,000 emails addresses, I would break it up into chunks of 30,000 email addresses. Then I only email one group per day, at most!

Also, never send to group #2 without looking at the results of the first email. This will let you see immediate feedback on how those email addresses are reacting to your email. Are they bouncing? Are they marking you as spam? Are they opening? Are they clicking? This initial feedback is crucial as you think about emailing the remaining 9 groups.

If the first group of 30,000 people has 20,000 openers and 10,000 clickers, I think it’s safe to say that you can quickly scale the remaining 270,000 email addresses. Conversely, if you send to the first group of 30,000 and it’s a 2% open rate with only a handful of clicks. Your list is even lower quality than you thought. I think it’s safe to say that there isn’t much fertile ground left in your 270,000. It doesn’t mean that you should not email them, it just means you should probably go even slower than 30,000 a day.

3) Send them Great Content

You have the audience and a schedule to email them. Now, what are you going to send them?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What email would stick out to you? What offer would you want? These are cold email addresses who haven’t opened up a single thing from you in the last year or more. What are they going to care about? Do you think they are going to want another 25% coupon just like you’ve sent them every day for the last year? No. They’re going to want something entirely different.

They want something personalized. They want something high context. They want something of immense value. Something that will take them from not caring about you to becoming an active customer again.

If you have a seasonal gifting business where you sell a lot at Christmas, I’d make sure that you’re not trying to reach out these people in the middle of July when they’re not in the market for purchasing gifts. Give them a relevant email before the gifting season that will resonate with them.

In summary, the audience, schedule, and the content are extremely important.

If the audience is fruitful or engaged in any way after the first email, you should continue to keep them engaged over time. Avoid putting them back into cold storage by sending them emails at least once per month, if not more often. Don’t overwhelm them with three days in a row, but instead, continue to craft unique content that is relevant to their problems. Mix up the messaging to ensure you are adding value, even when they don’t purchase.

What strategies have you used in the past? Did they work?