How To Warm Up a Cold Email List

Almost 4 months later, I finally did sent out that first e-mail!
I ended up going with Mailchimp, after trying out a different service that didn’t work our for me.

So here’s how I did it:

1. First I used Mailchimp’s features of custom groups and segments to differ between new subscribers (signed up within 2 months), old subscribers (signed up between 2 and 4 months ago) and really old subscribers (4 months or more). The timeframe was based on my publishing schedule, because I had a lot of published in November, and then there was a lot of silence.
(If you’ve been using Mailchimp from the start, you don’t need to use groups because you can just create a segment with sign up dates directly. I imported my subscribers manually from a different service so I had no information on signup date.)

2. I made the campaign for the oldest group that was a sort of “Oh hi there, sorry I haven’t written earlier *insert excuse here*, here’s a recap of what I’ve been doing in the 2013” and listed a few latest paintings and 3 featured blog posts.

3. I made another campaign for the less old group with just one painting (they’ve seen the ones before), and 1 or 2 blog posts.

4. Now I’m preparing a “regular” email that will be sent to everyone. The newer subscribers don’t even have to know what happened before.

I had no unsubscribes since I sent those campaigns, and the open rate was pretty good so I guess I did handle it ok!

I hope this helps if anyone else encounters this problem!