can you recuperate a cold list?

It may be possible, but it depends if the emails are still hitting their inbox or (more than likely) their spam folder.

Not much you can do other than keep mailing. Sounds like you learned the lesson. Just send higher quality content.

I've successfully turned a cold list into a warm list (in part at least) and here's how I done it.

1. Are they receiving your mail?
Make sure you send your mail as html and text, this ensures the best deliverablity, while including your images, links and some data to check out open rates etc.

2. Get that first response.
Well I can only tell you what I did. I segmented the list into recent opens and recurring unopened. I sent a broadcast to the segment that hadn't opened an email in the last month offering a competition!

I offered $50 to the first person who liked and tweeted my all the content on one of my websites. Obviously I spoke of the comp in the subject line so people could read it without opening.

This done two things.

-prompted people to take the action of opening if they were receiving the email.
-got my content viralised (to a certain degree ) for just $50.

(I had an open rate from this marooned list section of approx 8%)

This was ok and revived the list to some degree and more importantly weeded out all those on my list that shouldn't have been there.

A list of 1000 is only a list of 1000 if the entire list is opening.

It's better to get rid of all those that don't need to be there.

Why?

Because as your list grows into thousands and thousands you start getting charged more money for it!

Hope this helps!

Marcus

Of course you can save it, just be smart and add value.

There's always going to be a certain percentage of your list that won't respond... Won't open your emails... Won't click on your links... Etc.

This is true even if you have a great relationship with a massive list.

So what your seeing isn't a whole different if you would have kept the relationship developing throughout the lsat 4 months.

To tell you the truth, with only 335 subscribers, you should probably worry more about growing your list at this point. You can then worry about developing a relationship with the newbies, then trying to bring life back onto the small number of oldies.

Essentially all you can try to do is send them more valuable FREE information with the occasional affiliate link thrown in every now and again.