Re-engage your email list less awkwardly
When you ghost your email list, reaching out starts to feel awkward. Here's how to make it less painful.
I’ll admit it: earlier this year, I fully dropped off the map with the email list for my business.
I was spinning up this very newsletter and wrangling some health issues, so email marketing took a backseat.
I noticed that, when you ghost your email list, it starts to feel a little bit like that friend you’ve been meaning to reach out to–you feel awkward about sending a message, because it’s been so long since they heard from you.
To make matters worse, not sending a message now just makes you feel even MORE awkward later, so the awkwardness keeps piling up as more time passes.
Inaction clearly doesn’t solve the problem, so what can we do to make reaching out to our email list less painful after a long absence?
Explain, but don’t overexplain
If you’re calling that friend after a long break, you wouldn’t just act like nothing happened. Similarly, reaching out to your email list after 4 months with regular-degular sales talk would also be pretty awkward.
So, open with an acknowledgement of your absence. There’s no need to overthink it; something to the tune of, "you haven’t heard from me in awhile, life got in the way, I’m back now," is just fine.
However you want to state it, though, keep it short and sweet. Most folks won’t be interested in several paragraphs of you apologizing or overexplaining. Bonus: keeping it short will also keep us far away from the, “what the tragic loss of my pet goldfish taught me about B2B sales” zone. 😉
What if it’s been a really long time?
When it’s been 6 months, or a year, or two years, that’s long enough for you (and your business) to have gone through some significant changes. You can still go with the short acknowledgement, but you might also consider a re-engagement email.
You’ll still begin with acknowledgement that you’ve been absent, but you’ll also jog their memory with a couple of reminders, such as Who you are, What you offer, and Why they subscribed to your email list in the first place.
This can also be a chance to prune some of the people on your list who aren’t likely to open or interact with you, by including a link to confirm their subscription.
You can frame it as confirming they want to stay, or sending an opt-out link, but either way, you’ll shave off subscribers who are no longer good contacts for you. From there, you can resume emailing your list as you normally would.
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