Subscriber apathy
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When does your newsletter stop impacting or influencing subscribers?
I like to talk about unavoidable and avoidable factors. Let's look at the main unavoidable factors first. Later, I'll show you why they're not quite so unavoidable as they may seem at first glance. But for the moment, let's just accept them as a fact of email life:
- subscribers abandon - or stop monitoring - the email address they used to sign-up
- subscribers change their job or interests
- a subscriber's address bounces, so they never see the mail.
Now what about the avoidable factors:
- subscribers lack confidence or trust in the publisher
- subscribers find little of interest or value in the emails
- subscribers lack any feeling of connectedness or loyalty to the publisher or newsletter.
Back in the "good old days", email publishers didn't have to worry quite so much about subscriber apathy. Email was new and exciting, and there were few publications around. As a result, the quality bar for newsletters was pretty low.
Things are different now. People are drowning in a sea of email; personal correspondence, business correspondence, customer service messages, spam etc. The much larger number of newsletters now available exacerbates the problem; with choice comes selectivity.
There's only so much that a person can read. So they become selective in their reading habits. This raises the quality bar ever higher. The challenge this presents also applies to publishers with no direct competitors. It's not just about bettering the competition in your particular market, it's about competing with ALL other emails for space and attention in that inbox.
Persuading people to stay subscribed and continue reading your newsletter is harder than ever before; generating that enthusiasm, that influence and impact, is an even greater challenge. Let's see how you can best approach it.
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