The 5 People You Need on Your Mailing List
How do you not envy someone who’s lollygagging around eating bonbons when you’re working your butt off?
Hi again!
You can read the pretty version with pictures here if you prefer. It’s unlocked. :)
Otherwise, keep scrolling for the plain text version.
There’s a newsletter I read all year, except December. She doesn’t email in December. If she was taking December off, I’d understand. Honestly, I’d be a little jealous.
I work in ecommerce and December is brutal. How do you not envy someone who’s lollygagging around eating bonbons when you’re working your butt off?
But she’s not. She’s working her butt off, just like me.
She’s just not sending email.
At the beginning of December, she sends an email to say “you get enough commercial email in December, you won’t get more of it from me…”
That stupid email always ticks me off. You know why?
Because it tells me how she sees her subscribers.
I want to hit the reply key and ask if she stops emailing her friends in December, too. That’s rhetorical. I already know the answer. Of course she doesn’t.
But we’re not her friends, right?
No. We’re just her subscribers.
The Real Problem with Marketing
At the root of it, the problem with marketing is how it makes you look at people. So easy to look at them as clicks, conversions, buyers or prospects.
Wallets.
And then people say dumb things like every subscriber is worth XX dollars.
Or the tell you how much you “should be” making based on your list size.
It makes me shake my head.
Most marketing is myopic and short sighted.
Most of the email marketing I see smells of direct marketing. You know what I mean… last chance to sign up, very very last chance, doors are closing, you snooze, you lose.
On a video course that’s already recorded? Or a pdf?
Because fake scarcity, right?
And the worst of the fakery. Omg, the server crashed. Here’s one last chance... but hurry, it’s only gonna be up for 48 hours and then you lose.
I get it. Doing something beats doing nothing. But this isn’t long term thinking. Long term thinking means asking yourself what kind of emails will keep people reading in the long run.
The 5 people you need on your list.
Mitch Albom wrote a book called The 5 People You Meet in Heaven. It talks about how you meet 5 people that touched your life in ways you didn’t see back when you were alive. And how they affected your life.
Likewise, there are 5 people we could all stand to have on our list.
Your Mother or your child.
Your spouse or your best friend.
The teacher who had the greatest impact on you
Your boss, or the person who most affects your financial state.
Your role model — someone you admire and look up to.
It would change how you talk to people. Most of those would prevent us from talking like a pompous jerk. We’d think about what we send a little more.
Maybe even wish your subscribers a Merry Christmas. (snark)
The end result would be that we’d build something worth having.
Relationships.
If you missed my book question last week, it’s here. Thank you to everyone who clicked a box. I so needed that clarity. Much good coming in 2020 because of your input! I appreciate you — thank you!
Did you miss these?
On Writing: Are Men Just Better Writers?
Holiday Thoughts: The Day the Sun Stood Still
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and wishing you all the best in the New Year. By the time I write again, it will be 2020. Can you even believe it?
xo
Linda