Should You Subscribe To Lots of Email Lists?
By Anna Johnson on March 4th, 2010Should you subscribe to lots of Internet marketing (and other) email lists? After all, do you really want to be constantly inundated with emails from Internet marketers telling you to buy this, buy that… and often to buy the same thing as all the other Internet marketers are telling you to buy!
There’s certainly a limit to how much marketing email I can handle, but here’s why I subscribe – and stay subscribed – to a lot of Internet marketers’ lists and, more importantly, why I actually speed-read the emails they send: I get to see what they’re doing.
As I watch what they do, I also work out WHY they’re doing it.
I don’t just subscribe to Internet marketers’ email lists either. I also subscribe to the email lists of companies in the technology, health, investment, travel and various other fields. And I usually opt-in to receive email from large corporate brands too. Believe it or not, some big brands are doing some pretty cool things with email marketing. Check out this example from Borders: Now This Is Email Marketing.
It’s a classic example of learning by osmosis. And all it takes to build up my understanding of these Internet marketers’ email strategies and tactics is a few, painless minutes per day.
Of course, for many people, learning by ‘osmosis’ takes way too long. Can’t you ditch all the email noise and just buy a course on email marketing, product launches, etc and learn much more quickly that way?
Sure you can, and that may work better for you, but I reckon you’ll get the very best results by doing BOTH and, most importantly, by applying what you learn (start building a list and emailing them!)
Now, I should point out three VERY important things here. Firstly, I don’t recommend you subscribe to just anyone’s list. You want to subscribe to email marketers you respect and want to model in your own business.
Secondly, if you’re going to receive lots of email, you’ll want to ensure it’s manageable. I’ve set up rules and folders in my email reader so that everyone’s email goes into a specific folder. That way my email is manageable. I would NOT subscribe to lots of lists if I couldn’t manage all the email I receive.
Finally, I am a relatively fast reader, which helps in terms of quickly distilling someone’s email message. If you don’t consider yourself a fast reader – and don’t want to spend loads of time wading through marketing emails – then you have a few choices. You can just subscribe to a few, key lists – i.e. those of the marketers you want to model – or you can learn how to read more quickly (like most things, speed reading is a skill that can be learned, and it’s a pretty handy skill to have too).
In any case, when it comes to learning Internet marketing or any other skill, it’s often about doing ‘little’ things… but doing them every day. For me, one of those little things is monitoring what the top Internet marketers are emailing. The key lessons may not all sink in at once, but just like osmosis, they WILL sink in – and sink in deeply – over time.
