In reply to my email yesterday, marketer and long-time customer Fred Beyer writes:
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Step 1: Tell your audience there are Mavericks who are worth serving and Gooses who are not (I refrained from using the plural geese ’cause we’re referencing a nickname here after all).
Step 2: Ask your audience which one they are, so you can ignore them appropriately according to your own suggestion in the email.
From Simple Money Emails: “What people do remember is the emotional stimulation”, and here you’re letting a large part of your subscribers know they are less desirable than the rest.
Are you just trying to provoke unsubscribes here? 😂
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My primary goal yesterday was what I wrote in the email, to find out who on my list has their own email list that’s growing at a healthy clip.
At the same time, Fred raises a good point. It’s one I thought about yesterday as I wrote the email.
I decided that yes, I’m ok if a bunch of people I don’t have any plans on working with unsubscribe from my list.
It’s not about them being “undesirable” in some global, eugenic sense. It’s simply who I want to focus on working with, and who I don’t want to focus on.
Ironically, it didn’t end up happening. I’ve had just 2 unsubscribes so far from yesterday’s email.
This I think is a lesson in itself, and probably an interesting data point around the topic of natural authority.
But that’s a topic for another place, another time.
For today, if you are wondering about the reference that Fred makes, to Simple Money Emails, it’s my course on how to write simple, daily emails, like this one, which both bring in sales today, and keep readers — the ones you want — reading tomorrow as well.
For more info on that: