Welcome to the eleventh edition of email marketing tips on October 17, 2008.

A rather small edition today with the following topics:
General TipsStrategyChris Garrett’s Series About Email Marketing For BloggersCode Of Practice
Contact me to host…

Well, there’s a divisive debate going on in the online marketing world.

Agora and Matt Furey even recommends as much as twice a DAY, but seeing how much $ they’re making–they are probably on to something. If you have not noticed already, the 100m giant Agora has a lot of newsletter whose title starts with the word "daily".

My guess is that if you disguise your pitch as actual content, people will not consider it as spam. It’s when you start blasting without offering anything of value that problems happen.

Relationship building takes frequency, but tamper that with real value.

My 2 cents worth.

People who unsubscribe are important because, presumably, had they stayed subscribed they might have sent in some money. Whatever that amount of money is, I can only guess at. But, since they unsubscribed, I might assume that they were slightly less valuable than those who are interested enough to stay subscribed.

On the other hand, there are those people on the list who actually were inspired to spend because of those extra emails.

So, the questions is, where is there more money to be made, by trimming the fat (the unsubscribers), or by keeping the fat while losing some spending by the more faithful subscribers?

In other words, on my wee list of 10 subscribers, there may be two options:

1- I send fewer emails. Only 1 subscriber drops, and the rest spend an average of $100 each.

Profit total: $900

2- I send mails every 10 minutes, and hang outside their houses at night throwing pebbles at their windows. 5 subscribers drop. The other 5 spend $200 each, and one proposes marriage to me.

Profit total: $1000, one love-stricken fan, and reduced customer-care expenses.

So, there are two factors here.

What the unsubscribers might have spent VS  Increased profits from the remaining subscribers.

Neither of which I am smart enough to figure out. But I am smart enough to know having just one of them ain’t enough.

I suspect Mr. Bly has an answer up his sleeve…

Although…maybe they said 0.5.

Oh well I’ll go with your recommendation - that’ll keep me creating more high-quality content.

I honestly think that Clayton e-mails a lot and sometimes I think sh*t, this is too much! But at the same time I know that most of the content is interesting and relevant to what I do so I never unsubscribe.

So as everything in life…it all depends!

Another thing I like to do is make sure I’m providing 3-to-1 quality content to pitches.  It’s an arbitrary rule-of-thumb, sure, but I’ve found it works for me!

Success!
Jim

Unless the list is built in a very specific, tightly focused way it’s going to be difficult to keep even a large minority of the subscribers consistently engaged.  I even ignore emails from even uber-copy-guru Clayton Makepeace occasionally, much to my detriment.  What keeps me subscribed to some lists while others lose my interest easily?  Unvaried subject matter/content is wearisome so I think I may lose interest when a writer fails to challenge me to go deeper into the general topic I subscribed to learn about - somehow the relentless posturing of big affiliate launches doesn’t do it for me and I unsubscribe - and it’s not because these guys don’t provide valid content - it’s because more and more often they want me to watch long videos to figure out what the point is.  I’d rather get it in writing.