Everyone tells you the money is in the list, so more people try to get people to subscribe to the list. So more people are on more lists. So everyone gets more mail.
How do you get your mail noticed?
I've noticed some people say that building a list isn't the way to be doing it, because they believe with all this email overload it's a waste as they won't be reading your emails anyways.
While I agree that it takes creativity to get people to read your emails, I disagree that building a list is a waste. Really what you want to be doing is building a list of people, not email addresses.
Yes, you have their email address, but you should be building relationships with those people not just sending out emails to them. That's why you should have the return address be your inbox.
So many people put a bouncing address as the return email, which not only decreases your deliverability, but it makes customers angry when they can't easily contact you.
If you have real relationships with the people on your list, then it doesn't matter how many emails they get - they'll read yours. They'll see it's from you, and read it. You can play all these games with subject lines, but that FROM line is huge. If it's from someone you care about, you read it. If it's not, that's when interesting subject lines really matter.
This is one reason why you should find a balance in the number of emails you send. It's why I setup my auto responder to send the auto emails on Sundays. I don't post to my blog on Sundays, so I know you won't get too many emails from me. When you mail out too much, then people start to ignore your emails!
So there you have it, a few tips to improve your responses with your list:
- Send from a REAL email address, and reply when people email it! (I do, though I will admit I'm hugely slow)
- Build relationships with the people that are on your list (twitter, conferences, forums, emails)
- Don't send out too many, so you don't get ignored!
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