Cold, Dead Email Lists

Hello…. from London.

My family and I arrived here in London yesterday morning. As I type this, we all just got a great night sleep, but yesterday we were all coasting on about 2.5 hours of sleep in over a 30 hour period. International travel and timezones makes things interesting. 🤣

And literally on the train from the airport, had to bust out the laptop and fix a quick “site down” issue for a client. Luckily, it was quick. Tethered to my cell phone and juggling going through tunnels and losing my internet, I was able to get it back online pretty quickly. ‘Tis the business I’m in. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, this week, the theme of the WP Edge will be cold, dead email lists. How do you handle email lists that haven’t been used in awhile? I’ve had a few clients in this situation… hence, the topic.

First we’ll talk strategy… then we’ll hop right into how to do a re-engagement sequence. Specifically with FluentCRM.

OK, let’s get this party started….

Your Email List Isn’t Cold – You’re Just Forgettable

So you send a launch email and… nothing. No clicks. No replies. No sales.

You start to wonder: “Is my list dead?”

Sometimes, you KNOW it is rather dead because it has been a really, really long time since you’ve emailed them anything. But, sometimes you’re just not getting much of a reaction to the emails you DO send.

Sometimes… your list isn’t cold. It is just that you’ve gone quiet or become… forgettable.

Let’s fix that.

📉 Attention fades faster than you think

Inboxes are noisy. Attention spans are short. People will forget you pretty quickly. That’s just a fact of life.
If you’re not showing up regularly, with value and voice, you blend into the sea of inbox noise. If you only show up when you want to sell something, you’re training your list to ignore you.

Even your biggest fans will hesitate if they haven’t heard from you in weeks or months.
They’re not ignoring you. They just… forgot why they cared. They move on. Life happens.

🔁 Consistency > Frequency

You don’t have to email every day. But you do need to email often enough for your name to mean something when it pops up.

Here’s a simple rule:

Consistency creates familiarity. Familiarity drives trust. Trust drives clicks.

Set a sustainable rhythm:

• Weekly is ideal (every Monday, for example, which is what I do here with this newsletter)
• Biweekly works if you stay consistent
• Monthly? Risky, unless you’re delivering something seriously high-value

You don’t have to say something new each time — just something useful or meaningful.

Some people email even more often – even daily in some cases – and it works quite well. You may think subscribers would get annoyed at the volume, but that isn’t true at all if it is the rhythm and value proposition you set from the beginning. Done right, subscribers look forward to hearing from you. They’ll notice when you skip a beat.

🧪 Tactics to re-engage a quiet list

If your list has gone quiet, don’t panic. Warm it back up. Here’s how:

1. Send a “reboot” email

Subject: “Let’s get reacquainted?” or “Still interested in [topic]?”

Remind them who you are, what they signed up for, and what to expect going forward. Be real. Be human. Don’t oversell.

2. Run a 3-email value series

Space it over a week. Give them:

• Email 1: A behind-the-scenes story with a lesson
• Email 2: A quick win tutorial or tool
• Email 3: A personal insight or case study

No pitch. Just reconnection.

3. Use tags or segments

Look at who’s still opening. Create a “warm” segment to focus on first. Then gently try to re-engage the colder folks later with a clear re-opt-in opportunity.

🧠 Become more memorable

Forget fancy automations for a minute. Instead, focus on being rememberable. Here’s how:

• Stick to a recognizable format. This very newsletter has the same basic format each week.
• Use your real name. Don’t hide behind a brand alias. Make it personal.
• Be specific. Reference previous emails, offers, or reader questions.
• Reintroduce yourself. Every few months, remind people who you help and how.

📬 Bonus: Check your deliverability

Before you assume people are ghosting you, make sure they’re even getting your emails.

• Remove unengaged subscribers after 90–120 days (they hurt your sender score)
• Run your email through mail-tester.com and see what it says.
• Set up proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
• Avoid spammy subject lines or link-heavy emails

Bottom line:
If you want your list to buy, you have to show up – regularly, generously, and memorably.

Email isn’t dead. But passive lists are. Revive yours by becoming someone they want to hear from.

For More, see: Email Deliverability: The Simple Guide To How To Ensure Your Best Deliverability Metrics

Concierge Client Update

Out Of Office Notice

As I mentioned in last week’s issue, I am currently in London with my family and will be here in the UK for the next couple weeks.

For that reason, there isn’t likely to be much to report in terms of Concierge for the next couple weeks. 😇

I am connected and fully intend to handle emails, answer questions, and even take care of small tasks for clients while I am here. I am 5 hours ahead of my usual timezone, so timing might be a little different than normal.

There won’t be any project work taking place while I’m here in the UK.

My first day back in the office in Florida will be September 29th.

Here in London, we won’t have a car since there’s no point. But, on Wednesday, we pick up a car and head west. Wish me luck driving around on the “wrong” side of the road and car. 🥴

WordPress News & Updates

WP Amelia 8.5. When it comes to online bookings, I’m a FluentBooking guy all the way. But, WP Amelia has been around longer and, for that reason, is indeed a powerful tool. Version 8.5 was recently released, introducing Mailchimp integration, Recaptcha for logins, new payment options, and smarter form and booking logic. Check out the full announcement here.

ChangeLogWP Launches. ChangelogWP is a new site specifically aimed at tracking changes and updates to plugins across the ecosystem. It looks like they just pushed their first version public. Right now, it looks to be mostly a rehash of the public changelogs from the WordPress plugin repository, so it will be interesting to see how this site develops. Would be cool to see this tool mature and maybe even provide some kind of uniformity to how changelogs are managed.

SEOPress 9.1. Version 9.1 of SEOPress was released, offering integration with ChatGPT5, new import process from All In One SEO and some enhancements to the Site Audit. Full announcement here.

Major WPEngine Claims Against Automattic Dismissed. Many of the core claims by WPEngine against Automattic have been dismissed by the courts. Specifically, claims of antitrust, monopolization and extortion – the biggest of all of the claims – has been tossed out. That’s a big deal.

Rocket.net Downtime. Rocket.net had some downtime on August 30th in the Phoenix datacenter. This kind of thing happens from time to time across all web hosts, but one thing that shows how Rocket is different is that they posted an entire blog post on what happened and the changes they’re making to avoid it. It was a hardware failure. I have 7 client sites in the Phoenix data center, so I definitely noticed.

ACF Survey Results. Advanced Custom Fields does an industry survey every year. This year had 960 respondents and the results have been published. Always interesting to see a little bit of “inside baseball” here. Keep in mind, the target audience of ACF and who takes this survey are mostly people who work with WordPress, so that skews the results.

Fluent Forms Security Vulnerability Patched. Wordfence published a found security bug with Fluent Forms that affected 600,000 sites – including many of my clients. There was a bounty paid to the person who found the problem. It was reported to WP Manage Ninja, who promptly fixed it.

Cursor for WordPress?. If you know much about AI coding, you probably know about Cursor. It is an AI coding tool and really cool to use. Well, a new tool called Ablad has been announced with promises to be Cursor for WordPress. There’s not much there yet besides a teaser video, but worth keeping an eye on.

Simple Search Submission. A new, free plugin has been launched that will notify search engines automatically of updates to URLs. It just does this automatically, so it truly is simple. Note that this would only be useful, likely, if you’re running a free SEO plugin. Most Pro SEO plugins do this already.

Presto Popups. Presto Player 4 has been released and it looks like the big reveal for this version is Presto Popups. As the name sounds, you click on a little on a thumbnail, button or a block and…. up pops a video. I do this with Kadence sometimes already, but there wasn’t an easy way to make it trigger a Presto video. So, this would definitely have it’s uses.

WPForms PDF Generation. If you’re a WP Forms user, they’ve just launched a new add-on that allows you to dynamically generate PDF documents based on form input. It looks very well executed.

How to Run a Re-engagement Campaign Using FluentCRM

Got subscribers who haven’t opened an email in months? Don’t delete them just yet.

Let’s get specific on how to run a re-engagement campaign with FluentCRM. Why FluentCRM? Because I as well as most of my clients use this tool.

FluentCRM currently does not have any mechanism to automatically do re-engagement. However, using the tools it does have, you can still easily run one.

🔍 Step 1: Identify Your Cold Subscribers

Inside FluentCRM:

• Go to Contacts → Filter Contacts
• Choose filters like:
  • Last Email Open → Before 90 Days Ago
  • Last Email Clicked → Before 90 Days Ago
  • Last Activity → Before 90 Days Ago (this will cover anything, even logging into your site)
  • Status → subscribed (not unsubscribed or bounced)

You’ll need to pay attention to the and/or logic of the filters. Save this as a dynamic segment for easy reuse. Call it something like “Unengaged for 90 Days”.

✉️ Step 2: Create Your Re-engagement Email Sequence

Write a short, 2–3 email sequence. Here’s a simple framework:

Email 1: “Still want to hear from me?”
Remind them who you are, what they signed up for, and ask if they’d still like to receive emails.

Email 2: “Last call to stay subscribed”
A gentle nudge — offer one last chance to click and confirm interest. Optional: link to a valuable freebie or lead magnet.

Email 3: “You’re being removed (unless…)”
Let them know they’ll be unsubscribed automatically if they don’t engage.

Each email should include a clear button: “Yes, keep me on the list!”

🔁 Step 3: Build an Automation in FluentCRM

Go to Automations → Add New → Start From Scratch

• Trigger: “Contact Added to a Tag” and choose a tag like “Unengaged” as your trigger.
• Build your emails right into the automation using the “Send Custom Email” action step. Be sure to build in delays between the emails to set them 2-3 days apart.
• Before each email, use conditional logic to check if they clicked a link or opened an email. If yes, you immediately remove them from the automation and remove the “Unengaged” tag. If No, the automation continues.
• If they reach the end of the automation and have not reengaged, tag them as “Stale”.

✅ Step 4: Let It Run and Clean House

There’s currently no option in FluentCRM to automatically trigger an automation based on entry into a dynamic segment. Until there is, the way we will trigger this automation is to pull up our dynamic segment (“Unengaged for 90 Days”), then use the bulk operations to apply the “Unengaged” tag to each one.

That will automatically trigger the re-engagement automation. Just let it run.

After the sequence finishes, all the cold contacts will have the “Stale” tag. What do you do with them? You have options:

• Export stale contacts as a backup (optionally). Then bulk delete them or add to unsubscribed.
• Use the “Stale” tag as a global exemption, always exempting anybody with that tag from email campaigns.

Personally, I’d recommend the first option. Just get ’em out of there and have a cleaner list.

If you want some help building this, get in touch. I can help you get it all set up and ready to use in your FluentCRM setup.