How to Create a Cold Email Subscriber Re-Engagement Campaign and Automate It

Clean up your mailing list? Here's how to set up a re-engagement email sequence in ConvertKit to make sure you only remove cold subscribers!

This is the second in our series of blog posts where we'll take you with us as we detail the process of cleaning up our mailing list. In our case, that meant removing 40% of subscribers from our list.

In the previous blog post (and accompanying video), we explained the why of pruning your mailing list. The short version is that it makes financial sense, reducing the cost of maintaining a large list, and it can help boost your email sending authority.

In the long run, shrinking your mailing list will also be beneficial. By removing subscribers who haven't engaged with your content in the last six months or more, you end up with a more engaged audience.

You do this with a re-engagement email sequence, and in this article, I'll show you how to create one in ConvertKit.

Before deleting a group of followers, you need to make sure that these people really aren't interacting with your content. Why? Because your email service provider isn't infallible and can't tell with absolute certainty.

For example, someone can open and read all the emails you send, but this information may not be transmitted to your email service provider (ESP). And some subscribers who don't read your emails might just use a reminder (a light kick in the pants) of what they're missing.

Today we're going to cover how to set up a re-engagement email sequence that gives cold subscribers the chance to re-engage with your content.

In this article, we'll go over all the automations we've set up to do this in our ESP of choice, ConvertKit.

Creating a re-engagement sequence can seem complicated, even overwhelming. I highly recommend reading the high-level overview in this article and then watching Mindy's video on the topic, which provides just the right level of detail on the process.

She shares a closer look at the email copy and automations we use for this sequence.

Here are the general steps of the process.

Tag anyone who may be cold subscribers. Set up an automation that will send a series of emails to those subscribers asking if they still want to be a subscriber. Craft the emails in your re-engagement sequence. Create a second automation that keeps people on your list if they say they want to stay.

We will cover the process of deleting your cold followers in the third article of this series. For now, let's go over the above four steps in a bit more detail!

Step 1: Identify your cold subscribers

First you need to assemble the list of likely cold subscribers you want to automate.

Here are the steps to do it in ConvertKit.

Go to the Followers tab and create a new segment. Under 'Select your followers', set 'Match any/all/none of the following' to 'all' and click 'Add filter'. Select 'Engagement Score', set Min Stars to 1 and Max Stars to 3, then click 'Add Filter'.

Selecting subscribers between 1 and 3 stars allows us to capture people who are less engaged with our email content.

Once you click Add Filter, you'll see the number of followers who match that criteria.