Email list
The set of people who agreed to hear from you directly — the most durable owned channel most businesses will ever have.
An email list is the group of people who have given you permission to contact them directly. It is unglamorous, decades old, and still the most reliable owned channel available: no ranking, no feed, no intermediary deciding who sees you today.
The number that matters is not size. A list of 800 people who opted in because they wanted a specific thing from you is worth more than 15,000 collected from a giveaway, because the second group agreed to receive a prize and not to hear from you. Growth bought with an unrelated incentive shows up later as low opens, high complaints and a slow decline in whether your mail arrives at all.
The second thing operators get wrong is frequency in the wrong direction. Lists decay from silence far more often than from over-sending. A list mailed twice a year has to reintroduce itself every time; a list mailed monthly is already familiar when there is finally something to sell.
Worked: 3,000 subscribers, mailed monthly, opening at 38%. A launch reaches 1,140 people who know who you are. The same list mailed twice a year opens at 14% — 420 people, most of whom are deciding whether they remember signing up, on the one occasion you actually needed them.
Also known as
- mailing list
- newsletter list
- subscriber list
Relevant for
- Creators
- Grow the list with the thing you actually sell, not with a giveaway — an audience assembled by a prize will not open the email that matters.
- Business owners
- A short monthly note to past clients keeps you present when their need finally arrives; the practices that only write when they want work are the ones that get ignored.