A friend, who is among the top copywriters in the industry, has an email list of more than 3000 focused subscribers.

These subscribers are marketers and copywriters who signed up on the website for a business he ran.

He is now starting a brand new email list dedicated to his personal brand.

He wants to move some of these existing subscribers to his new list. To do it right, he wanted to set up an opt-in page and have everyone opt-in for his new list rather than pivot the old list to his personal brand. 

He knew that this will keep the quality much higher, but it also meant losing out on 95% of potential subscribers.

I told him to do the following.

Taking Your Email Subscribers, With You On A New Journey

Engage 1-on-1 with each of your 3000 subscribers.

It will take work but you may increase your conversions 5 times, 25% of people opting in instead of 5%. 750 or even 1000 subscribers instead of 150 that original approach will yield.

Write a personal note to each one of your subscribers, and tell them briefly about the transition and the value they’ll get in the new avatar of the list.

Instead of asking them to opt-in via a link. Ask them for a yes in reply, in case they want in.

I used this approach to build a list of 13,000+ subscribers in 53 days.

To make the process manageable I used a canned response, with 1-2 customized lines for each email.

You can do the same.

Don’t get overwhelmed. Break your action into small parts.

Cover 3000 emails over a period of 2-3 months. Send 40-50 emails, 4-5 days a week. You can also get an assistant to do it. I had asked my friends for help when I built my list.

You can use the same approach for bigger lists.

Hope it helps 🙂