How often should you email your subscribers?
A contentious topic, to be sure, with no right answer.
Fortunately, the question is entirely irrelevant.
However frequent or sparsely you mail your list is completely secondary to:
What am I doing with my list?
Am I just sending them ‘newsletters’ because I want them to buy from me?
Because if that’s you, even once a month is too often.
Ask yourself things like this:
Am I sharing information, and inspiration, and entertainment etc – a nice mix of the things that my friends like me for?
Am I sending because I want to get reactions, and feedback, and connections, and conversations – am I building relationships?
Am I filtering my list for the people who are most engaged, and therefore I’m ok with losing people who think twice a week is too much?
Am I talking about the right thing, in the right way, to the right psychographic?
Am I creating messaging specifically for a narrowly defined audience?
These are the questions that really matter, when we’re talking about email marketing.
Because I’ll tell you this:
Once you get your topic, voice, problem-set and customer avatar dialed in, you’ll be talking about something so damn important to your subscribers, you can send emails every day.
You’ll end up talking to the subset of your list who is so very interested, they could listen to you all day long.
That’s your audience.
These are your buyers, they’re your fans, your ambassadors and referrers.
And yes, they’ll take it as often as you send it. Guaranteed.
The rest of your list, well some of them will tune out, and some of them will unsubscribe.
And that’s good, because then your list quality goes up.
Me, I’ve been sending daily for years.
My list still grows, and because I clearly state I send dailies when people sign up, unsubscribe rates are low.
And apparently, people love these daily ditties.
People tell me that I’ve become a part of their life, thank me for all the ongoing learnings – even say: “When are you going to charge for these?”
So yeah. Go daily, all the way.
Of course you might worry that if you go from irregular or infrequent sending to daily, you might lose a large part of your subscribers overnight.
To avoid that, I’ll be sharing a simple experiment tomorrow, that you can run on a subset of your list, in order to see how people respond, without running the risk of decimating your list.
Stay tuned…
