Respect Your Email List

How To Not Stand Out In Your Subscribers Inbox

There is a trend in email marketing that is very annoying. It’s a way of promoting offers that is so bad that it makes me not buy what they’re pushing, even if the product is good.

If you’ve been in the online marketing niche for any length of time, you are probably on a lot of email lists.

That’s not necessarily bad. You can learn a lot from what other marketers are sending and what content they include in their messages: stories, jokes, how their weekend went, and so on.

Sometimes you get some useful things that you can use in your own emails. And sometimes you get a whole lot of what not to do.

So there is an advantage to getting a lot of email. However…

Sometimes it gets to be too much

There are a certain group of lists that I’m on that seem to have the habit of promoting the same product at the same time.

I get it. In the online marketing space, it’s customary for products to have a launch date, and a lower starting price. The sooner you buy, the less you pay.

So there’s a rush for list owners to get the message out to their subscribers on launch day, tell them about the product, and urge them to get it at the lowest price possible.

So I end up with a lot of emails in my inbox on launch day about the same product. Not ideal, but I understand why they do it, and I would do it as well.

After all, they have a list so they can recommend products that they think their subscribers will find useful. The better ones offer some incentive in the form of a bonus or a bundle to buy from them.

Don't Do These Things...

What I can’t stand is when I start going through the messages, and find that most of them have the exact same message. Ofent the same exact title. Word for word. It’s like they copy and paste and send the email that was provided by the vendor.

Lazy. And as I mentioned in my article on review pages, if you’re putting the same content out that your competitors are, you don’t have an advantage.

In my world, that’s not the way to treat your list. I respect that they are running a business. But they should respect their subscribers as well.

This is another example of how having a lot of email messages showing up in your inbox can be a valuable asset. In this case, showing you what you should not do to your subscribers.

You have to realize that your subscribers don’t have to open your messages, and they don’t have to stay subscribed. They are on your list because the get value out of it.

I need to point out something here. I am not against using premade content. It can be a time saver. The problem comes if the same content is showing up at the same place at the same time.

 When you’re trying to get your subscribers to buy something, respect them enough to write a message from you to them. Sure, you can use the provided content, but add to it, modify it, rewrite parts of it.