Never Ask Your Followers to “Sign Up for My Newsletter”
Instead, provide something much more valuable
I see these email mistakes every day and despite how much I rant on the subject, the culprits don’t seem to be leaving soon.
“Keep in touch.”
“Sign up for my newsletter.”
“Subscribe for updates.”
“Join my list.”
These are the popular ones. We’ve all seen them. Some of us are guilty of using them. But if we want to build a real email list and we want more than one subscriber a month, we’ve got to look at the sign-up process differently.
1. No One Wants to Be on a List
Yes, you can call it your list to anyone, but your tribe. These are the people who built your business — one person at a time. One purchase at a time.
These folks don’t want to be part of some list. They want to feel unique, as if you’re speaking directly to them. One at a time.
Lists make customers feel like cattle.
List make customers feel like you don’t care.
Lists make customers leave you — fast.
2. No One Wants Your Newsletter
No matter how much time you spent writing that first issue, we care about the old number one. We want your solution to our problem. We want you to transform our current situation to a better situation, using your content.
We don’t want another newsletter.
Our inbox is jammed-full of newsletters we never open.
We want something more. Something that feels special.
3. No One Cares About You or Your Company
As excited as you may be about your latest project, we don’t think this is newsworthy. We want stuff that will help us get where we want to go. This is how subscribers find value.
If you don’t give us value in a way that helps us (not you), we’ll unsubscribe.
If you don’t give us value for the time we spent reading your email, we’ll unsubscribe.
If you don’t give us so much value we wouldn’t dare miss your next email, we’ll unsubscribe.
OK, So What Do I Offer Instead?
Give. Give until it hurts. Then, give a little more.
Offer something of real value in exchange for your customer’s email. Email is the last frontier. We cancel social profiles all the time but a customer may keep their email address for 20 years.
Never take a customer’s email address for granted.
You’ve been given permission to contact them directly. Abuse it and you’re done — fast.
I like 7-day courses
They’re easy-ish to build and can be delivered automatically, every day, for a week.
This gets your customers used to opening your content from the moment they sign-up. If you give them a single PDF, most people ignore the rest of your emails or unsubscribe as soon as they get the free thing. I still do it all the time, and I’m on dozens of lists.
Short courses encourage readers to return daily
If you want to give a PDF, make sure it’s more than a three-page blueprint, disguised as an ad for your $2,500 product. We’ve all seen that stuff before.
Your free gateway offer (easy invite) should be something of real value, that solves a specific problem, whether or not the subscriber ever buys something from you in the future.
Your Word Choice Matters — A Lot
I ask people to “enroll in a masterclass” not “sign-up for my email newsletter”.
Which one sounds more exclusive to you?
Sure, I’ll take a free masterclass! In fact, I’ll take two while you’re passing them out. Armed with a thesaurus and a little creativity, you can take a super-lame email offer and spruce it up to something sleek and compelling.
Everyone offers a newsletter.
Everyone wants us to keep in touch.
Everyone wants us to be excited about their upcoming projects.
Don’t be like everyone. Build an email list-building process that engages the subscriber from day zero. Talk to one person at a time. Don’t think of your subscribers as a list.
There’s a real human at the other end of each email address and they should be treated as such.
