Do you have an ezine, newsletter, or any type of opting email list? Do you regularly broadcast to them (and I’m not talking about prewritten autoresponse messages)?
I’ve been in this business since August 1996. That’s quite a long time considering a year doing business online is equivalent to 5 years offline.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is that I have a confession to make… sending out a broadcast message to my subscribers totally scares the begeebers out of me.
Ironic being that my ezine is what started my online business in the first place… over nine years ago.
As a matter of fact, I just sent one early this morning… my usual “Carmen’s Journal” issue, and I still had to go through my neurotic routine of running the text through spell checkers and content analyzers, sending 15 test messages to myself, and finally making the sign of the cross and asking God to keep me from exploding into a full-blown anxiety attack.
Saying I’m frightened is an understatement.
What am I so afraid of? Well, several things…
- Nobody will open it
- Nobody will find it useful
- Zero feedback about what I’ve written
- Unsubscribes (I know how you gurus out there say unsubscribes are no big deal because those people don’t want your stuff anyway… but to me, it’s like getting dumped.)
This all started about 3 years ago. I worked hard at putting together an incredible issue… I was ecstatic with the articles I’ve written and the new marketing tools I reviewed. I was looking forward to hearing back from my readers!
But when I sent it out, I received NO feedback. Days passed. NOTHING. I could see that my readers have clicked through the links in the message… many even purchased the products I talked about… but I heard from NO ONE. Not a peep from anybody. I was all alone in the rain without an umbrella (drama queen moment)…
When I asked about the nonexistent feedback in the issue that followed, some wrote saying they DID send me a note. But where? I never received them. Maybe it got caught in the filters? Or were they just trying to be nice? I don’t know. I will never know. But I do know that for some unexplainable reason, it has affected me in a ginormous way.
Oh! Don’t even get me started about this morning…
I was shocked to receive a few unsubscribes… it was heart breaking for me and it took all that I had to fight blinking just to keep the tears from rolling down my face (drama queen moment: part 2).
My 4 year old would refer to this as having “brain problems.”
Then I found that after a certain number of “undeliverables”, Aweber automatically unsubscribes those addresses from the list. I double checked the addies and sure enough, they were undeliverable and automatically unsubscribed.
I guess what I’m trying to get across with this is… if you’ve been putting off contacting the people on your list because you’re afraid of rejection, just write to them already! Look at me… I let nothing keep me from getting in touch with my readers. Not even “brain problems”.
The psychologists & students of human behavior among you will have a field day analyzing this post, aren’t you?
« All done!
