If You’re Worried About Annoying Your Email List, Then You’re Already Not Annoying Them
Boom, end of substack. We can all go home now. 🙂
If you’re a person who is considerate of your audience’s clogged inbox, worried about frying their brains with one too many marketing messages, and more inclined to email them less often than more often, then I’m here with some good news…
You’re doing it right.
Boom, end of substack. We can all go home now. 🙂
This is a very common concern among business owners who see themselves (and their audiences) as humans first, and service providers (and potential customers) second.
So. Let’s get into it.
One big reason you feel hesitant to email your list “too much” is because of how YOU feel on the receiving end of an unwanted marketing email:
Annoyed
Overwhelmed
Put upon
Pressured
Overstimulated
Interrupted
Gross
Like your humanity doesn’t matter; only your wallet
Taken advantage of / being manipulated
Like the whole internet is a massive dumpster fire and the only way to “succeed” is to compromise all your principles, treat everyone you meet like a cog in a transactional machine, and scale! scale! scale! until the planet melts and we all succumb to the dystopian future we’re currently hurtling towards.*
*Oh you don’t feel that way? Yeah. Me neither. Totally. 🤷🏻♀️
OF COURSE you wouldn’t want to evoke those feelings in anyone else, let alone the folks who trusted you with the keys to their inbox!
Who actually read the words you clack away at!
Who value what you have to say, and maybe even look up to you!
The problem most empathetic, human-first entrepreneurs run into here is that they can’t seem to find the nuance in email marketing. You don’t want to annoy or manipulate your email subscribers, so… you don’t email them. Ever.
And when you do, it feels cringey AF.
I want to do a couple of things for you today—
One: reveal a little behind-the-curtain strategy from some of the biggest, most annoying email marketers, so you can feel better about your own motivations and strategy…
Two: break down the various components of “good” vs. “bad” email marketing, so you can think about this from a more critical, less subjective point of view…
And three: Write enough words so we can scroll down and stop watching Jim Carrey fake-hurl. 👍
First up: In “big box” email marketing—think your 7- and 8-figure entrepreneurs, course creators teaching people how to create courses, marketers teaching people how to market, coaches coaching coaches to coach, and most mainstream digital marketing—
Annoying the list is *built into* the strategy.
At best, it’s thought of as a necessary evil. But most of the time, it’s done very deliberately.
Look at the frequency of these emails below.*
*Throughout this piece, I tried to block out all the identifying details of my examples, but if you know who these people are, try to remember it’s not about the person or even the validity of their offer, although I do call that into question sometimes. This is about email marketing strategy.
Full disclosure, this sender is in the midst of a live launch, so they’re emailing more often than usual. Usually, this would be a ramp-up of their normal email cadence, which is twice a week. So, still a fuckton of emails.
I have been on the back end of planning live launches like this. I’ve written so many launch emails it’d make your eyes pop out of your head. 👀 1
👆That there is a real spreadsheet I once used to plan a live launch for a (former) client, and when I asked if we should chill out on all these emails so we wouldn’t annoy our list, the response was essentially, “We don’t care if we’re annoying them.”
Lemme tell you something about the thinking behind this kind of email schedule.
The bottom line is always, ALWAYS more important than the humanity of the people who make that bottom line exist in the first place.
There’s a very, “Oh, sweet child of summer, bless your heart” attitude toward anyone who questions the ethics or suggests that the people on the email list are people, not walking ATM machines.
And if you’re not picking up on that dripping, pitying condescension, then you either need to read some George R.R. Martin, or come visit the South sometime. 😏 ✌️
Just to drive this home, there’s a well known financial adviser and course creator who emails their list EVERY SINGLE DAY. Every day!
Their strategy is NOT to get you to read every single one of those emails. They’re trying to place themselves at the tippy top of your inbox every day, so that sooner or later you’ll be so sick of seeing them up there that you’ll finally open one of the damn things.
Even so, every single email has to be a freakin’ masterpiece, just in case that’s the one you finally open. Which means there’s probably some poor underpaid writer out there, leaving it all on the page, knowing that 95% of their work is destined for the trash bin.
Sigh. Let’s not get into the rampant exploitation of copywriters that’s happening in this industry, because that is another soapbox for another time. But it’s fucking upsetting.
By now you should be feeling like an alien on a strange planet, because I know that none of this is remotely similar to the way your brain works when you think about sending emails to your list.
Which is my WHOLE POINT. muahahahaha!
Whenever we’re looking at what we don’t want (like bro marketing), it’s really easy to focus on NOT DOING the wrong thing, instead of on DOING the right thing.
In this case, the sheer quantity of emails is not the only—or even the worst—offense here, although it does show a blatant lack of respect for the reader’s time, energy, and attention. But that doesn’t mean the solution is just to email your list less often.
This is where the WHY comes in.
In the example above, the WHY was something like, “Get as many people as possible to open my emails so they buy my course.”
But then there’s my client Anika, who emails her list at least two times a week, sometimes three.
Anika’s in the DIY space. Woodworking, teaching beginners how to use power tools, and “Demystifying DIY.” (<< That was me 🤭)
She landed on this email cadence because that’s what her subscribers expect from her industry, and that’s the cadence that gets her the highest open/click rates and the lowest unsubscribes. Plus, her competitors follow the “annoy people” school of thought, so her emails are more likely to get buried in someone’s inbox.
Those are all very good reasons! And it’s all in service of what the people on her list want—what THEY prefer, and what works best for them.
She also operates in good faith—almost all of her emails deliver what she promises (woodworking plans), so even if one particular plan doesn’t interest them, they’re still engaged and happy to hear from her. They’re certainly not annoyed! They love her. :)
Emailing your list consistently is a good thing, NOT an annoying thing. I think once a week is a pretty good target to shoot for.
If nothing else, you need to keep reminding people that you exist. If you’re not emailing your list with any regular frequency—or if you’re only emailing them to beg them to buy something (gasp!)—I recommend committing to once a month at first, then twice a month, then go from there.
See how your subscribers respond, and keep experimenting until you find your sweet-spot cadence.
There’s something even more important than the frequency of your emails though, and we’ve been dancing around it this whole time—
Making sure the people on your list actually want to be there.
Let’s look at another example. This time, peep the subject lines.
These emails are not annoying because they arrive twice a week. They’re annoying because I don’t actually care about any of this information. And that’s not this guy’s fault.
I’m not the right person for this email list.
By contrast, I’m on both of Tara McMullin’s Substacks (What Works and her latest, Cold Pitch) right now, and I absolutely love her deeply layered perspective, her nerdy research brain, and the fact that she’s not afraid to write a long ass email. (I’m also very impressed and jealous that she’s able to do that with such consistency and frequency.)
But I can’t always keep up with reading her newsletters, because I am a known procrastinator and dawdler, and a super long piece of writing that makes me question my entire existence is way too good of an excuse for me to avoid working.
So. I’m not regularly opening or reading her emails, and the frequency is a little bit overwhelming for me, but…
Am I annoyed? No!
Am I even considering unsubscribing? No!
Am I bursting with goodwill and warmth toward Tara? YES!
Let’s go back to the entrepreneur in the inbox screenshot above.
In their email opt-in, they could (and should) say something like, “Join my email list and I’ll send you twice-weekly emails about how to create & sustain a thriving paid community!”
That’s exactly what they’re doing. And if some—or even most!—of those emails include some sort of invitation to work with them, great! This person literally helps people create and sustain thriving paid communities, so… where’s the lie?
Let’s say you’re smack dab in this person’s target audience, and you smashed that subscribe button so you could learn everything they had to teach.
Even if you later decided that twice a week was too much, you wouldn’t be annoyed at the person sending them, would you? They delivered exactly what they promised!
Aaaaaanyway. I think I’ve made my point.
Here’s the TL;DR.
How *NOT* to Annoy Your Email List
Be a person who doesn’t want to annoy your email list.
Check!Be truthful and transparent about what it’s like to be on your email list.
Start by drafting out exactly what will happen, then give it a zhuze. Here’s mine:
Use data and market research to determine the cadence (frequency) of your emails, not your personal feelings about annoying marketing emails.
I’m the #1 fan of vulnerability and listening to your intuition, but I think our internal compasses are a little screwy from all this time we’ve spent in online entrepreneurial land. (See my PS.)Send good emails.
Tell stories, share wisdom, crack jokes, give ‘em a quick win, be yourself, talk about that thing you’re worried will offend people. If you need help with this, join my email list! 😂
(But, like, really. 🤨)Don’t freak out when you get unsubscribes.
The more you lean into your core message, unique point of view, and values, the clearer your subscribers will get about whether or not they want to be there. Unsubscribes are a good thing. If your reader was really that annoyed, they’d mark your emails as spam. 😳
Don’t compare anything you’re doing to those big name, 7-figure email marketers. They’re not here for the same reasons you and I are, and they aren’t playing by the same rules.
They’re not even operating in the same universe.
P.S. Before you go, I just want to remind you that you and I have a verrrry different relationship with our inboxes than our email subscribers might have.
Do you know how many “normal” (i.e. non-business owner) friends I have with hundreds and thousands of unread emails in there? Do you know how few of them truly understand what I do for a living, despite receiving multiple marketing emails a day that they willingly signed up for?
I can’t be sure about this, and I’m not pretending I don’t need to hear this more than anyone—but I’m willing to bet that nobody takes your work as seriously as you do.
Nobody is keeping score, nobody is as wrapped up in your shit as you are, and the entire internet is made-up anyway.
This newsletter is sponsored by Jim Carrey and his weird rubber face.
Segmentation is not reflected in what you see in this gif. A few (but not that many) of these emails were resends to unopens, and some of the post webinar emails (but not that many) only went out to webinar attendees. This also took place in January 2019, during the halcyon days of live launching. The industry as a whole has calmed down since then, and you rarely see this kind of quantity anymore.