Emailing your list isn’t a science.

There are lots of thoughts, lots of suggestions.

You’ll never please everyone all the time.

So what should you do?

The best answer is be yourself.

Send what you’d like to receive, as though you were writing to just one person.

Because actually that’s what you’re doing.

Sure, you’re sending the very same email (give or take some personalisation) to however many people are on your list.

But the more you make it a personal email – one that you really could have written to just a single person – most of the time the better your results will be.

Think about the emails you receive.

What makes you read certain ones and delete others and leave others waiting to be read at some indeterminate point in the future between soon and never?

Then think how you could get closer to modeling the ones you’d prefer to be on the receiving end of.

And watch your response rate go up!

Frequency of emailing your list

There’s no ideal frequency.

I aim for one email a day but some days I’ll send two emails, other days none if I have nothing to say or haven’t made the time to write something I think is worth people’s time reading.

Test your list.

For most markets, once a day is fine.

You’ll get unsubscribes on your autoresponder.

But you’ll get those whatever you do – people will unsubscribe for lots of different reasons.

And – for you – it’s cheaper if they unsubscribe as you can then remove them from your autoresponder account and stop paying for them.

Plus if they made the effort to unsubscribe they probably weren’t going to buy anything from you any time soon.

What to say? When to sell to your list?

A good rule of thumb to follow in what to say when you’re emailing your list is say something interesting.

I try to make it that even if I’m selling something there’s some good information in either what I write or on the sales page I’m sending people to.

I don’t necessarily succeed in doing that all the time but it’s definitely the aim.

Or I might do an information based email (or one that points to a blog post like this one) and then put in a P.S. that has something for sale.

It varies.

And that (I think) is a good thing.

The stuff I promote varies.

If I’ve done something on the subject, I’ll naturally promote that.

But if someone else has done something that I think is good based on what I’ve seen of the product, I’ll promote that if it makes more sense. Like this link to a product about list building or this one to promoting your product on Udemy. Or this one on Udemy about podcasting.

All those are links to products I’ve got personal knowledge of.

And personally I think you should do the same.

Don’t just blindly promote in the hope of an affiliate commission or a sale.

Make it personal.

Something that will help your list.

In the same way you wouldn’t knowingly recommend something to a friend that was something you weren’t confident about.

Of course, that recommendation can be “reserved”.

I’ve had that done to me – years ago, a friend suggested I get a CD by the Spin Doctors on the basis that he didn’t like it but it fitted my tastes. I bought it, it did and I even still play it.

So you can use that kind of psychology every now and then – so long as you’re happy that your email list would react appropriately.

Which probably means this post has raised more questions than answers.

If that’s the case, sorry!

But if you’d like to add to the discussion about emailing your list, use the comments box below.