How Not to Email Market
The last few days I’ve been feeling pretty ruthless with my inbox. I am pretty used to getting large volumes of email, that is my norm. It is not uncommon for about 500 emails a day to land in my inbox. The last few days, I’ve been hitting the unsubscribe links a lot.
I’ve spent a lot of time exploring listbuilding and email marketing. There appears to be two schools of thought on the subject.
One is build a relationship with your list. Treat them like you’d like to be treated and they will want to buy from you when you send them an offer. There is a lot of sense in that approach. Think about how you build friendships, you don’t build strong friendships based on what the other person can and will do for you. You build up trust and rapport. When the time arrives you need some help, a friend will usually do what they can to respond. There is a mutuality in a friendship which doesn’t really happen when building business relationships but I think you get the drift. 
The second approach is more of a scatter gun approach. Get the person on your list by what ever means you can and then just hammer the calls to action at them. I wont even say offers, as a lot of what I have been seeing lately is people engaged in ad swaps and sending me off to sign up for even more lists. Do they care if I unsubscribe? Not really, they are out there getting even more people on their list. The listbuilding continues forever.
The first approach takes time. It means you are committing to actually providing value to the customer or potential customer. You care that they have a meaningful experience on your list. People who take the first approach get a lot more of my attention and rarely do I unsubscribe. That doesn’t mean everything they send me gets my immediate response, or read, but I can usually see the person is trying to send me relevant material. Yes, they are going to send me offers, it is email marketing after all.
The second approach is what triggers my unsubscribe clicks. I get that building a list using ad swaps can be effective. Sending me emails that tells me you just found me this great resource and I should go there right now is not building a relationship with me. When I get to know someone and they start trying to push me around, I dump them. I don’t have to nor do I deserve that treatment.
If the resource you are sending out an ad for is so great, then why don’t you tell me about it before I spend my time clicking over to it and entering my info? Likely because you haven’t even looked at it and can’t be bothered finding out if the so called resource is any good. I’ve looked at all kinds of these ‘great resources’ and I’ll tell you, rarely are any of them worth my time. So why did I look? I was curious about just what is being offered.
Did it get anyone a sale? Definitely not. Will the tactic generate future sales? Definitely not, I’ll already be unsubscribed by the time you send me something I might have cared about.
Yes, I’m building a list. I’ll be using the first approach, not the second. I don’t want to be treated like a lemming and wont be treating others the same. I’d be honoured if you’d join my list.
Which list building approach do you prefer? What triggers you to unsubscribe? What motivates you to stay?
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