UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 51Avoid the CleanseHow to Keep Your Subscribers

Recognized, Relevance, Relationship

In UnMarketing, we spoke about e-mail and how important¹ your mailing list is, even in today's social media–focused online world. E-mail is still valuable and targeted and is the best way to reach an audience who has opted in for your content. Whether or not our kids will use e-mail remains to be seen, but for now I would rather have a subscriber list than a following. When people subscribe to your newsletter, they are putting their hand up, asking to stay in touch with you. This is a huge opportunity to send useful information and be helpful—remember in UnSelling, we don't use our newsletters only to push discounts. No one signs up for your newsletter for you; they sign up for themselves.

That said, my own inbox can be a very busy place.

I've been cleansing for the past week. Not one of those cleanses that your friends post about on Facebook that makes you cringe, but an inbox cleanse. I'm trying to clear my inbox and stay on top of it. I was at 1,800+ e-mails that needed my attention a few days ago and am now down to 140. One of the things I've been doing is unsubscribing from almost every newsletter I've been on. Only a select few have survived from the dozens, if not 100+ I was on. Why did they stay?

Recognized, relevance, relationship.

I recognized the sender and remember signing up in the first place.

The content is relevant to me, not just relevant to the sender, like a sales ...